When Hiddenness Feels Like Disappearing

A Dialogue with St. Arsenius on Fear, Longing, and the Courage to Be Held by God Alone

A Disciple: Father Arsenius, I feel torn in two. I long for hiddenness, and yet I fear it. I want the silence, and I dread the silence. How can the same thing draw me and terrify me at once?

St. Arsenius: Because you are standing between two loves. One is old and loud. The other is new and quiet.

A Disciple: The old one feels like being held. By the world. By voices. By usefulness.

St. Arsenius: It feels like being held because it once warmed you. But warmth is not embrace. Noise is not shelter.

A Disciple: And yet when I imagine letting it go, no audience, no response, no recognition, I feel as though I will vanish. As if hiddenness means being erased.

St. Arsenius: Hiddenness is not erasure. Erasure is when the world no longer remembers you. Hiddenness is when God does.

A Disciple: But the silence feels like absence.

St. Arsenius: It feels like absence because you have learned to measure yourself by echo. God measures you by presence.

A Disciple: Why does my heart cling to what scatters it?

St. Arsenius: Because the heart learned to survive there. It does not yet know it can live elsewhere.

A Disciple: How do I step past the fear without breaking myself?

St. Arsenius: You do not step away from the world. You step toward God, one small consent at a time.

A Disciple: What does that consent look like?

St. Arsenius: Staying when the silence feels empty.

Not filling the ache with explanation.

Letting the hand reach out and finding no one there.

A Disciple: That sounds cruel.

St. Arsenius: Only if you believe the world was holding you. When the hand finds no one, it learns to open instead of grasp.

A Disciple: And then?

St. Arsenius: Then you discover you were never falling. You were being gathered.

A Disciple: From where?

St. Arsenius: From the many eyes of the world into the single gaze of God.

A Disciple: So the fear is not a sign I am on the wrong path?

St. Arsenius: No. It is the sound of a door unlatching.

A Disciple: And the longing?

St. Arsenius: The memory of home, stirring before you arrive.

A Disciple: If I let the world’s hands fall away, will God truly be there?

St. Arsenius: He has been there all along. He was only waiting for your hands to empty.

A Disciple: Then teach me how to walk.

St. Arsenius: Walk by staying.

Stay when nothing answers.

Stay when no one sees.

That is how erasure becomes hiddenness,

and hiddenness becomes home.