When God Alone Is Enough

On the quiet passage from doing for God to remaining with Him

“One thing is needful.”

— Luke 10:42

There comes a time when a question begins to form in the heart that one could not have asked honestly before.

It does not arise from contempt for the world, nor necessarily from disappointment with one’s work. It may come after many years of labor, after responsibilities faithfully carried, after words spoken and written, after friendships and communities, after building things that seemed worth building. Much of it may have been good. Much of it may have borne fruit. Some of it may even have been given by God.

And yet quietly, almost imperceptibly, another desire begins to emerge.

Silence.

Not silence as respite from activity so that one might return refreshed. Not solitude as recovery before taking up one’s work again. Something deeper.

The heart begins to desire silence for itself, because there, stripped of so many things by which it once understood its life, it discovers the presence of God.

At first this can be frightening.

We become accustomed to knowing ourselves through what we do. Even holy things can become part of this architecture of identity. Priest. Monk. Teacher. Writer. Spiritual father. Servant. Builder. Caregiver. The one who speaks. The one others seek.

None of these things is necessarily false.

That is precisely why relinquishing our possession of them can be so difficult.

We imagine renunciation primarily as the abandonment of sinful things. But eventually God may ask us to loosen our grasp upon good things as well—not because they have ceased to be good, and not necessarily because He intends to take them from us, but because He desires the heart to know whether it can receive even these things from His hand without making them the ground of its life.

The desert has always understood this.

The cell gradually removes the answers we have constructed to the question, Who am I?

There is no audience in the cell.

There is no reputation to maintain.

There is no future to arrange.

There is no usefulness to prove.

There is no one before whom we must justify our existence.

There is only God.

And this is why silence can initially feel almost like death.

Something is dying.

The self that knew how to exist through activity, recognition, responsibility, usefulness and even service to God finds increasingly little upon which to fasten itself. The heart reaches instinctively toward the future: perhaps another work, another ministry, another place, another form of usefulness, another way of understanding what one’s life will become.

But the silence gives no answer.

It simply says:

Remain.

And if we remain long enough, something astonishing may happen.

What initially felt like deprivation begins to feel like freedom.

The question changes.

No longer:

What will I do next?

Nor:

Where will God use me?

Nor even:

What is my vocation now?

A simpler and more terrible question appears:

If God asks nothing more of me than to remain before Him in silence and love for the rest of my life, is that enough?

For a long time one may hesitate before such a question.

Because saying yes means surrendering more than activity.

It means surrendering the demand that our lives become comprehensible to us.

We may never know what all the preceding years were preparing us for. There may be no final work in which everything comes together. There may be no visible vindication of our sufferings. No resolution of every wound. No assurance that the future will assume the form we presently imagine for it.

Even the places, communities and forms of life through which God has loved us and drawn us more deeply into Himself must finally be received as gift rather than possessed as guarantee. We may love them, belong to them, hope for them, and entrust ourselves to the obedience they ask of us without demanding that we know beforehand what God will make of that belonging.

The monastery itself teaches this. Its deepest gift is not that it provides us with a future we can possess, but that it schools the heart in surrender. Stability is not control. Obedience is not certainty. The cell does not tell us what tomorrow will bring. It teaches us where to stand today.

Before God.

The Fathers fled into the desert because they understood something that the heart takes a lifetime to learn: God is not the means by which we accomplish the spiritual life.

God is the life.

Prayer is not preparation for the real work.

Prayer is the work.

Silence is not emptiness waiting to be filled.

Silence can become communion.

Hiddenness is not the unfortunate condition of someone no longer useful to the world.

Hiddenness can become the place where the last remnants of self-reference are consumed.

The elder sitting unnoticed in his cell may appear to have disappeared from the world. Yet perhaps for the first time he has ceased needing the world to tell him that he exists.

He stands before God.

And God knows him.

This is enough.

There is something almost childlike about the freedom that begins to emerge here. One no longer needs to decide what one’s life must become. The future can remain unopened. Tomorrow belongs to Providence. If God sends someone, receive him. If He gives a word, speak it. If something ripens in silence and asks to be written, write it. If He asks for service, serve. If obedience gives a particular form to the life, receive that form gratefully.

And if for a time He seems to ask for nothing?

Remain.

The great temptation is to turn even this into another identity.

I will become a hermit.

I will live the eremitic life.

This will be the final form of my vocation.

But the desert quietly purifies even this desire.

It is not for us to seize a name for ourselves or determine beforehand the final form of our offering. Hermit, monk, priest, servant—these words are true only insofar as they express a life received from God and lived in obedience.

The deeper question is simpler:

Do I belong to Him?

And can I allow Him to determine what that belonging will look like?

Perhaps this is why the desire for silence can grow stronger rather than weaker as other desires diminish. Something beneath the identities, ambitions, wounds, dreams and even apostolic desires has tasted another possibility:

to live without continually referring life back to oneself.

To wake and remember God.

To pray.

To perform the small obedience immediately at hand.

To care for the person placed before us.

To repent.

To keep watch over the heart.

To endure one’s poverty without fleeing from it.

To whisper the Name.

To allow evening to come without needing to have accomplished anything by which the day can be justified.

And then to rise again and begin.

There may still be words.

There may still be work.

There may be monastery and brotherhood, obedience and service.

There may even be unforeseen forms of fruitfulness that cannot presently be imagined.

But these things cease to determine the shape of the heart. They are received according to Providence rather than grasped as guarantees against uncertainty. The heart has found its place more deeply still.

Before Him.

This movement cannot be manufactured. Nor should it be romanticized. There is loneliness in the desert. There is warfare. There are memories that return with astonishing force when noise disappears. There is the terrible confrontation with one’s own thoughts. The Fathers knew all of this.

Yet beneath everything there can gradually emerge a desire so simple that we scarcely recognize it as desire anymore.

I want God.

Not God and a meaningful life.

Not God and fruitful ministry.

Not God and recognition.

Not God and ecclesial security.

Not God and the assurance that everything will eventually make sense.

God.

And perhaps this is one of the deepest works of grace in a human life: that after decades of saying that God is enough, the heart finally begins to discover that it actually desires Him to be enough.

Then the question comes again:

If God asks nothing more of me than to remain before Him in silence and love for the rest of my life, is that enough?

And strangely, the answer no longer requires argument.

It simply rises from somewhere beneath thought.

Yes.

Tomorrow the question returns.

Yes.

When the future becomes uncertain:

Yes.

When the old identities call after us:

Yes.

When we wonder whether we are disappearing:

Yes.

And when Providence gives back to us some form of life, community, obedience or service we had ceased trying to possess:

Yes.

The same yes.

Not because nothing else matters.

Because everything that truly matters must be loved in Him and received from Him.

Perhaps this is the freedom toward which the desert has been leading us all along. Not freedom from vocation. Not freedom from obedience. Not freedom from community or responsibility.

Freedom from needing any of these things to tell us who we are.

Then we can receive them more purely.

We can love without possessing.

Serve without constructing an identity from service.

Belong without demanding security.

Obey without needing to see where obedience leads.

And remain without fearing that hiddenness means disappearance.

At the end of a long life of seeking, striving, teaching, building, losing, loving and beginning again, prayer may become very small.

No explanations.

No plans.

Almost no words.

Only this:

God is.

I am before Him.

He knows me.

That is enough.