When Nothing Remains Between the Heart and God

Purity of heart, stillness, and the surrender of the desire to see

“Who is the man that knows that delightful bending of the knees, when the tongue is still and the heart silently utters some doxology?”

— St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 22

There comes a point when the soul must cease looking for God.

Not because God is absent.

Because the looking itself can become another form of distraction.

We imagine that the spiritual life consists in acquiring something: light, understanding, consolation, vision, certainty. We want to perceive what is hidden. We want prayer to open. We want the heart to become warm. We want some assurance that the long labor has brought us nearer to God.

Isaac quietly removes all of this from our hands.

Even the angels cannot move themselves into divine contemplation at will.

God reveals Himself when He wills.

The soul cannot force open heaven.

It can only become still beneath it.

This is why Isaac speaks so insistently of purity.

Purity of heart is not primarily moral perfection. It is not the immaculate record of a man who has succeeded in becoming good. It is something poorer and more terrible.

It is simplicity.

Nothing divided.

Nothing secretly negotiated.

Nothing kept back.

The pure heart has ceased trying to possess even God.

It stands before Him empty.

And this emptiness is the beginning of sight.

We often think that purity will allow us to see extraordinary things. Isaac reverses the order. The desire for extraordinary things may itself be one of the things from which we must be purified.

Visions are not the measure.

Consolations are not the measure.

Understanding is not the measure.

Even the sweetness of prayer is not the measure.

God is the measure.

The Fathers were remarkably sober about spiritual experiences because they understood how easily the ego can survive beneath religious clothing. A man may renounce money, comfort, reputation, and pleasure and still secretly desire to become someone before God.

Someone who knows.

Someone who sees.

Someone who has attained.

Someone whose prayer is deep.

The desert takes this man from us as well.

The modern elders repeatedly return to the same poverty. Do not seek experiences. Do not examine yourself endlessly. Do not ask whether you have advanced. Do not manufacture states of prayer.

Remain.

Repent.

Call upon the Name.

Let God do what belongs to God.

This is stillness.

Stillness is not merely the absence of sound.

A man can live alone and carry an entire city within him.

He can close the door and continue arguing with a thousand people.

He can abandon the world and spend his solitude imagining what the world thinks of him.

He can pray while watching himself pray.

He can seek God while continually measuring how near to God he has become.

This is not hesychia.

The desert is not created by walls.

It begins when the heart stops answering every voice that calls it away.

Isaac gives us an extraordinarily beautiful image: the body resting upon its knees, the tongue silent, while the heart itself offers doxology.

Nothing spectacular occurs.

A man kneels.

His tongue becomes still.

His heart speaks to God.

Perhaps this is closer to the summit of the spiritual life than many things we would consider exalted.

No argument.

No explanation.

No spiritual performance.

No need to understand what is happening.

Only the creature before the Creator.

Only the heart before God.

Only doxology.

And Isaac immediately warns us that even this cannot be produced by technique.

“Such things do not happen at will.”

That sentence protects the whole spiritual life.

We cannot manufacture grace.

We cannot force the heart open.

We cannot demand consolation because we have prayed long enough.

We cannot make ourselves contemplatives.

We cannot storm heaven by spiritual ambition.

There is something deeply liberating here.

Our task is much smaller.

Purity.

Stillness.

Faithfulness.

Isaac says that these gifts are granted to those who “guilelessly walk before God in the discipline of stillness.”

Guilelessly.

Perhaps that word contains almost everything.

To come before God without strategy.

Without bargaining.

Without pretending.

Without asking what this prayer will make of us.

Without constructing a spiritual identity from what happens there.

Simply to remain.

This is why stillness is so severe.

It eventually removes the audience.

Then it removes the imagined audience.

Finally it removes the man who has been watching himself.

What remains?

A heart before God.

And perhaps purity of heart is nothing more mysterious than this: that nothing remains between them.

Not even our ideas about God.

Not even our ideas about ourselves.

Not even our desire to become holy.

There is only the poverty of attention.

The Name.

The breath.

The bowed head.

The knees upon the earth.

And God.

We may spend years wanting to see.

The desert teaches us instead to become capable of being seen.

To remain beneath the gaze of God without fleeing into thought, usefulness, fantasy, memory, anxiety, or spiritual ambition.

This is harder than visions.

It is also safer.

The man who seeks visions may still be seeking himself.

The man who seeks only God must eventually consent to disappear.

Then prayer becomes very simple.

Perhaps painfully simple.

There may be no sweetness.

No light.

No answer.

No sense of progress.

There may only be the next invocation of the Name.

And the next.

And the next.

Yet hidden within this poverty is the purification Isaac describes.

The heart is slowly being gathered from everywhere it has scattered itself.

From yesterday.

From tomorrow.

From what others think.

From what might have been.

From what we believe we ought to become.

From even the holy future we have imagined for ourselves.

Everything is brought back.

Here.

Before Him.

This is the work of stillness.

Not to create an extraordinary life.

To stop leaving the place where God already waits.

Perhaps grace will one day bring the heart into that silent doxology Isaac describes.

Perhaps it will not.

That is no longer our concern.

The pure heart does not say:

Give me light.

Give me understanding.

Give me consolation.

Give me a sign that I have arrived.

It says only:

You.

And eventually even that word becomes unnecessary.

The tongue falls silent.

The knees bend.

The heart remains.

And God is enough.