When God Keeps the Soul in His Memory

Synopsis of Tonight’s Group on The Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian Homily 5 paragraphs 24-28

St Isaac reveals a truth that is both luminous and frightening. He tells us plainly that nothing shapes the soul more profoundly than the afflictions God allows. In prosperity, the heart drifts. It forgets that it is a creature, and begins to imagine that the strength of its own hand has gained these things. In comfort, the soul becomes dull. In praise, it becomes intoxicated. And in success it begins, slowly, almost imperceptibly, to enthrone itself.

So God, in His mercy, disrupts this illusion.

He sends the tutors of grief and the teachers of fear. Not because He delights in suffering, but because He knows what the soul becomes without it. St Isaac speaks with severity because he has seen the madness of those who, having tasted power, wealth, or health, forgot the One who gave them breath and dared to call themselves gods. Nothing is more lethal to the spiritual life than a life free from the memory of God.

Thus God places the soul in the crucible of adversity so that remembrance might be rekindled. He stirs us with the fear of things hostile, not to crush us, but to drive us toward the gate of His mercy. And when He delivers us, His deliverance becomes a seed of love. When He comforts us, His comfort becomes a memory of His providence. When He saves us, His salvation becomes the ground of gratitude.

This is the strange and paradoxical path St Isaac sets before us:

afflictions become the birthplace of divine sonship.

Within their furnace the soul learns who God is, learns how He cares, learns how to love and to give thanks.

But St Isaac pushes further. Affliction alone is insufficient if the soul does not respond with remembrance. Forgetfulness is the true death, the soul’s quiet apostasy. Thus he commands:

Seat yourself before the Lord continually.

Do not let your heart wander into trivial anxieties lest, when the hour of trial comes, you find yourself unable to speak boldly before the One you barely remember. Intimacy with God is born of continual conversing with Him. Forgetting Him is not merely a lapse but a rupture in the bond of trust.

And then he reveals the fruit: from long abiding in this remembrance, the soul is drawn into wonder. The heart that seeks the Lord begins to rejoice. The condemned become strengthened. The repentant become purified by the brightness of His face.

Finally, St Isaac places before us the two paths, both simple and searching.

The sinner who returns will not stumble over his sins; the Lord will not remember them.

The righteous man who falls and persists in his sin cannot rely on his former virtues; he will die in the darkness he has chosen.

Everything depends on the present turning of the heart.

St Isaac’s words strike with the clarity of desert fire. Affliction is not the enemy but the womb of remembrance. Suffering is not punishment but invitation. Every grief becomes a gate. And the soul that accepts the discipline of remembrance, that seats itself continually before God, finds that even the darkest circumstances become a field where the seeds of divine love take root and flower.