When the Heart Can No Longer Contain Its Joy

Vigil, perseverance, and the hidden formation of a heart capable of wonder

“He cried out, being overcome with joy and not able to endure the heat of the flame, for he could not contain himself.”

— St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 21

Synopsis of Tonight’s Group on The Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian Homily 20 paragraphs 9-12 and Homily 21 paragraphs 1-6

There is something extraordinarily beautiful in St. Isaac’s teaching on vigil because he never allows the ascetical life to become merely a matter of discipline. He speaks of psalmody, prostrations, fasting, reading, stillness, wakefulness, and the struggle against sleep. Yet beneath all of these there is something else taking place. A heart is being prepared for God.

The vigil is not valuable because a man has succeeded in remaining awake while others sleep. Nor is the measure of the spiritual life found in how many psalms have been recited or how many prostrations have been made. These things matter because through them the heart learns to remain. It learns not to flee when consolation disappears. It learns to desire God when desire itself seems to have grown cold.

This is why Isaac is so tender when speaking about weakness.

If the monk can no longer stand, let him sit.

If he cannot complete his accustomed psalmody, let him pray quietly within his heart.

If his body will no longer sustain the vigorous prayer and prostrations to which he is accustomed, let him at least remain awake before God, pondering what is good.

There is no violence here against genuine infirmity. Isaac explicitly warns against fighting the body when illness has truly weakened it. The point is something much subtler: do not abandon the place of encounter simply because you can no longer remain there in the manner you once did.

Remain.

This may be one of the deepest lessons of vigil.

There are seasons when prayer comes easily, when the heart seems almost carried by grace. There are other seasons when everything becomes heavy. The psalms are dry. The body resists. The mind wanders. The fervor that once seemed inexhaustible disappears.

Isaac tells us that even this can become part of our formation.

God permits us to experience the variation of our own soul—fervency and coldness, strength and weakness, consolation and heaviness—so that we gradually cease trusting in ourselves. The man who has known only fervor may secretly imagine that fervor belongs to him. But the man who has watched it disappear and then suddenly return knows differently.

Grace came.

Grace withdrew.

Grace returned.

And he stands astonished.

The experience makes him wise.

This is why perseverance in the hour of heaviness is so important. We discover something that cannot be learned from books alone: the darkness of this moment is not necessarily the truth about God, nor even the truth about our soul.

Remain a little longer.

Sit before Him if you cannot stand.

Whisper His Name if you cannot sing the psalms.

Keep the lamp burning.

And sometimes, almost without warning, the heart becomes light again.

Then the man remembers how impossible everything seemed only hours before, and he marvels at the change. What he thought he had lost forever has returned as gift. His prayer is no longer simply prayer. It becomes thanksgiving.

This helps us understand Isaac’s extraordinary statement that stillness, reading, moderation in food, and vigil “speedily rouse the mind to awestruck wonder.”

Awestruck wonder.

This is where the ascetical life is leading.

Not toward grimness.

Not toward spiritual achievement.

Not toward a heroic image of oneself.

Toward wonder.

The passions ordinarily narrow our perception. We become enclosed within our fears, appetites, grievances, fantasies, memories, and plans. We see everything in relation to ourselves. But stillness slowly clears the inner space. Vigil awakens attention. Reading fills the mind with the things of God. Fasting loosens the tyranny of appetite.

And then something unexpected happens.

The heart begins to see.

A verse of Scripture that has been read a hundred times suddenly becomes unbearable in its beauty. The Name of Jesus awakens a tenderness that cannot be explained. The thought of the Cross pierces the heart. The mercy of God becomes so palpable that tears arise without effort.

Isaac says that the eyes become “two fonts of baptism.”

This is not emotionalism. It is the heart recovering its proper sensitivity.

The spiritual life makes us capable of being astonished again.

And this is precisely what Isaac sees in the anonymous monk whose vigil he witnessed.

The brother begins his psalmody, but something interrupts him.

Grace.

Suddenly he throws himself upon the ground. He rises. He kisses the Cross. He prostrates again. He returns to the psalms. Then the thoughts awakened within him become so filled with fervor that he cries aloud.

He cannot contain the joy.

There is something wonderfully free about this man. His prayer has ceased to be merely something he performs. Prayer has taken possession of him.

Even his reading becomes like this. Isaac says that the monk became “like a man taken captive.” A chapter cannot simply be finished. Again and again he must fall upon his face. A verse awakens praise, and his hands rise toward heaven.

The text has become encounter.

And perhaps this is one of the clearest descriptions of what the Fathers mean by spiritual reading. We do not read merely to acquire thoughts about God. We read until something within us is wounded by God.

Then the book falls from our hands.

Silence begins.

Wonder begins.

Prayer begins.

Yet Isaac gives us another detail about this monk that is even more important.

The man was merciful.

He was modest.

He was easily entreated.

He was cheerful.

He was loved by everyone.

When another needed his help, he left the solitude he loved and worked beside his brethren for days. When he possessed something another needed, he could hardly bring himself to say that he needed it himself.

Here the truth of his vigil is revealed.

The fire burning in the cell had become generosity outside the cell.

This is the test.

If vigil merely makes us severe, something has gone wrong.

If fasting makes us judgmental, we have misunderstood fasting.

If solitude makes us incapable of bearing another person, our solitude has not yet become communion.

If prayer makes us preoccupied with our own spiritual state, we have not yet been taken captive by God.

The monk Isaac describes burns before God at night and becomes gentle toward men during the day.

That is the whole spiritual life in miniature.

The vertical movement toward God becomes a horizontal movement of mercy toward every human being.

And notice especially his cheerfulness.

This matters.

The ascetical life is sometimes imagined as creating somber men, withdrawn and perpetually conscious of sacrifice. Isaac presents something entirely different. The man who gives himself most intensely to God becomes joyful, approachable, easily entreated, generous.

Why?

Because his heart is becoming free.

He no longer has to protect everything.

His time.

His possessions.

His strength.

His reputation.

Even his solitude.

He loves his cell deeply, yet when his brothers need him he leaves it.

This is not a contradiction of stillness. It is its fruit.

The true hesychast does not cling even to hesychia.

He has discovered Someone greater.

Perhaps this is why Isaac also speaks so sharply about pride. Even extraordinary asceticism can become poisoned if we begin secretly contemplating ourselves. The man may fast, keep vigil, maintain stillness, and tame the body—and yet pride can enter unnoticed.

Then Isaac sends him immediately downward.

Ashes.

Earth.

Prostration.

Humility.

Remember what you are.

The ascetical life must continually empty us of self-reference, because its purpose is not to produce an impressive spiritual person. Its purpose is to create within us a heart spacious enough for God.

And when such a heart begins to emerge, desire changes.

At first we compel ourselves to pray.

Later we ache to pray.

At first we struggle to remain awake.

Later love makes sleep seem an interruption.

At first we read because we know that reading is good for us.

Later a single verse can hold us captive.

At first we make prostrations deliberately.

Later the body falls before God because the heart can find no other language adequate to its gratitude.

Discipline has become desire.

Desire has become fervency.

Fervency has become wonder.

Wonder has become thanksgiving.

And thanksgiving has become generosity.

This is the beautiful coherence of the spiritual life that Isaac shows us.

The monk who kisses the Cross twenty times during the night is the same monk who cannot refuse his brother during the day.

The man who weeps over the Scriptures is the man who cheerfully gives away what he himself needs.

The man who longs for his cell nevertheless leaves it when love calls him forth.

The man who disciplines his body becomes tender toward the weakness of others.

Everything is becoming one movement.

Love.

And perhaps this is what vigil ultimately teaches us.

The night strips away the illusion that life must always be productive, visible, useful, or acknowledged. While the world sleeps, a man stands before God for no reason other than that God is God.

Nothing is accomplished.

Nothing is seen.

Nothing is rewarded.

There is only the creature before the Creator, the beloved before the Beloved.

And slowly the heart discovers that this is enough.

Then something extraordinary happens.

The man who has learned that God alone is enough no longer approaches the world demanding that it satisfy him. He can receive it with wonder. He can give himself without constantly measuring the cost. He can serve without needing to be seen. He can relinquish what he possesses. He can rejoice in another’s good.

The hidden vigil has made the heart generous.

This is why the spiritual life cannot finally be understood as the acquisition of virtues or the completion of ascetical practices.

It is the formation of a certain kind of heart.

A heart awake.

A heart easily moved.

A heart capable of tears.

A heart wounded by beauty.

A heart that falls before the Cross.

A heart that cannot contain its joy.

A heart that gives freely because it has discovered that everything is gift.

A heart that remains before God when there is fervor and when there is none.

Until one night, perhaps unexpectedly, grace draws near again.

The heaviness lifts.

The heart catches fire.

And the man who had struggled simply to remain discovers himself overcome with wonder, scarcely able to comprehend the generosity of God.

Then prayer is no longer something he must accomplish.

It becomes the cry of a heart that has finally discovered what it was created for.