When the Horizon Narrows

Stillness, Holy Renunciation, and the Recovery of the One Thing Necessary

“But one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.”

— Luke 10:42

There are seasons in the spiritual life when God seems to enlarge the horizon. Doors open. Relationships multiply. Work becomes fruitful. One discovers gifts that must be exercised for others, and the heart seems drawn outward in service.

There are other seasons when God appears to do precisely the opposite.

The horizon begins to narrow.

Things once experienced as important lose their urgency. Activities that once seemed unquestionably good become strangely burdensome. Words become fewer. The desire to explain oneself diminishes. Even worthy forms of service begin to feel as though they are drawing the heart away from something more essential.

At first this narrowing can be frightening. We may interpret it as exhaustion, failure, disappointment, or withdrawal. Certainly these possibilities require discernment. Yet the Fathers knew another kind of narrowing: the mysterious concentration of the whole person upon the one thing necessary.

Saint Isaac the Syrian speaks about this with an uncompromising severity that can disturb us:

“The work of preaching the Gospel is one thing; the activity of stillness, another.”

We instinctively want to reconcile them immediately. We want to soften Isaac’s distinction, assuring ourselves that contemplation and action belong together.

And ultimately they do.

But Isaac refuses to allow us to escape the force of his words so easily.

There comes a point when the person called to stillness must choose.

Not between good and evil.

Between good and God.

The Severity of Stillness

Isaac tells the monk who desires stillness to become like the Cherubim, taking no thought for the affairs of this life and living as though “no one else exists in creation save you yourself and God.”

These are shocking words.

More shocking still is his insistence that the monk must “harden his heart” and restrain even his compassion lest solicitude for others continually pull him away from prayer.

Surely Christianity cannot mean becoming indifferent to others.

Isaac does not mean this.

The man who wrote so magnificently of the merciful heart—a heart burning with compassion for human beings, animals, demons, and the whole creation—could hardly be advocating lovelessness.

He is speaking instead about the purification of love from anxious possession.

There is a compassion that comes from God.

And there is a compassion that arises from our inability to allow God to be God.

We tell ourselves that we are concerned for others when sometimes we simply cannot bear not to intervene. We feel responsible for situations that were never entrusted to us. We carry other people’s lives in our imagination. We rehearse conversations, anticipate problems, attempt to manage outcomes, and call the resulting agitation love.

Isaac calls us back from this.

Stillness requires the painful discovery that I am not Providence.

The world existed before me.

The Church existed before me.

God loved those whom I love before I knew them.

And should I disappear tomorrow, Christ will not cease shepherding His people.

For the ego, this is humiliating.

For the soul, it is liberation.

The One Thing Necessary

The movement toward stillness is therefore not primarily a movement away from people.

It is a movement toward God with an increasingly undivided heart.

This is why the Gospel image of Martha and Mary remains so important.

Martha is not doing something wicked. She is serving Christ.

That is precisely what makes the passage unsettling.

Her problem is not service.

Her problem is fragmentation.

“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things.”

Many things.

There is the diagnosis.

The spiritual life can become filled with many good things—ministries, apostolates, correspondence, teaching, writing, meetings, programs, causes, responsibilities, conversations about God.

Yet somewhere beneath all of this the heart may begin to whisper:

One thing.

Not because the other things are evil.

Because they are many.

And the heart was created for One.

The Modern Elders and the Return Within

The modern elders echo Isaac because they lived amid a world increasingly incapable of interior stillness.

Saint Silouan discovered that the deepest work of the monk is hidden within the heart. His prayer widened until it embraced the whole Adam, yet that universal love did not arise from ceaseless outward activity. It was born from profound repentance, prayer, humility, and the descent of the mind into the heart.

Saint Sophrony shows us the same paradox. The person who truly enters the depths before God does not become less capable of loving humanity. He begins to bear humanity differently.

He no longer needs to control the world in order to love it.

He carries it before God.

Saint Porphyrios likewise continually redirects the attention toward Christ. Do not spend your life staring into darkness, analyzing darkness, fighting darkness. Turn toward the light. Love Christ. Let the soul become so captivated by Him that lesser things gradually lose their hold.

And Saint Paisios repeatedly warned against allowing the mind to be scattered everywhere by curiosity, news, controversies and the endless problems of the world.

The elders understood that attention is spiritual substance.

What continually receives our attention eventually shapes our heart.

The question, therefore, is not simply whether something is good.

The question becomes:

Does this help me remain with Christ?

Why Such Clarity Is Necessary Now

Perhaps no age has made Isaac’s counsel more necessary than ours.

We carry the entire world in our pockets.

Wars, scandals, ecclesiastical controversies, political conflicts, tragedies, arguments, messages, photographs, opinions and crises arrive before us continuously.

We know things human beings were never meant to know in such quantity.

We are invited to have opinions about everything.

We are expected to react immediately.

Even compassion has become technologically amplified. At every hour we can discover another tragedy about which we might feel guilty for not caring enough.

The result is not necessarily greater love.

Often it is simply a shattered attention.

And a shattered attention eventually produces a shattered heart.

This fragmentation enters religious life as easily as anywhere else.

We can spend enormous amounts of time discussing the Church while scarcely remaining with Christ.

We can defend the faith without praying.

We can consume endless spiritual material without becoming spiritual.

We can speak about contemplation while never becoming silent.

We can follow controversies involving bishops, priests, monasteries and institutions while our own heart remains unattended.

We can even turn the Desert Fathers into more content.

Isaac will not permit this.

He says, in effect:

Go into your cell.

Close the door.

Remain there.

Let the world continue without your supervision.

Stand before God.

When the Call Deepens

There can come a time when stillness no longer feels like one spiritual practice among others.

It begins to feel like the place toward which everything has been leading.

Prayer becomes simpler.

Words become fewer.

The desire to persuade diminishes.

The need to be understood weakens.

One becomes less interested in participating in every conversation, defending every position, correcting every misunderstanding, answering every request.

Not because love has diminished.

Because love is being gathered.

Something within begins to understand why the Fathers fled.

They were not necessarily fleeing people.

They were fleeing dispersion.

They had discovered something so precious within that they became afraid of losing it.

The Kingdom had been discovered in the heart.

And once the pearl of great price had been found, everything else had to be measured against it.

The Painful Renunciation of Being Needed

Perhaps one of the final renunciations of stillness is the renunciation of being needed.

This can be especially difficult for those whose lives have been shaped by ministry.

To preach, teach, counsel, guide, build, write and care for others can become intertwined with one’s sense of identity.

People ask.

We respond.

People need.

We give.

And much genuine love may be present within this.

Yet eventually Christ may ask something more difficult:

Will you allow Me to be their Savior?

Can you love someone without continually carrying his problems in your mind?

Can you pray for someone without needing to solve his life?

Can you entrust people to God and return to your cell?

Can you accept that some questions will remain unanswered?

Can you bear the possibility that others may misunderstand your withdrawal?

Can you allow yourself to become less necessary?

Isaac’s “hardening of the heart” begins to appear differently here.

It is not hardness against another person.

It is hardness against the compulsion within ourselves that refuses to relinquish them to God.

From Activity to Presence

The deepest movement of stillness is from doing things for God toward being with God.

This is why Mary remains the image.

She sits.

She listens.

She receives.

Nothing about her appears productive.

And Christ defends her.

“She has chosen the good portion.”

There comes a point when this Gospel must cease being merely beautiful and become frighteningly concrete.

What if Christ actually means it?

What if prayer is not preparation for the important work?

What if communion with Him is the important work?

What if the hidden life is not a retreat from fruitfulness but the place where true fruitfulness begins?

What if sitting at His feet is not something we do until we are called back into usefulness?

What if it is the destination?

You Yourself and God

Isaac brings us finally to an extraordinary simplicity:

You yourself and God.

Everything else entrusted to God.

Not despised.

Not forgotten.

Not unloved.

Entrusted.

This is the strange freedom of the hermit.

He withdraws from everyone in order to discover everyone again in God.

His cell becomes larger than the world because the world is now encountered within prayer.

His apparent inactivity becomes intercession.

His silence becomes hospitality.

His hiddenness becomes communion.

The heart that ceases grasping others becomes capable of bearing them.

Perhaps this is why the growing desire for stillness should not immediately be feared.

It must certainly be discerned. Weariness can imitate detachment. Disappointment can masquerade as renunciation. Hurt can disguise itself as solitude.

But neither should every movement toward withdrawal be pathologized.

Sometimes grace narrows the horizon.

Sometimes God removes tastes that once sustained us.

Sometimes the many things become strangely pale because the One Thing has become luminous.

And sometimes the deepest call is simply:

Remain.

Remain when nothing appears to be happening.

Remain when there is no project to accomplish.

Remain when others do not understand.

Remain when prayer feels poor.

Remain when the world continues loudly beyond the door.

Remain until the heart discovers that it never needed to contain everything.

It needed only to contain Him.

The world does not need more religious noise.

The Church does not finally need more frantic activity.

And perhaps our age does not suffer primarily from too few words about God.

It suffers from too few people who have allowed themselves to become silent enough for God to consume them.

The Fathers entered the desert because they believed this.

The modern elders remind us because we have forgotten it.

And perhaps the tightening of the horizon is not loss at all.

Perhaps grace is gathering the scattered heart.

Many things fall away.

Many voices become quiet.

Many concerns are entrusted elsewhere.

Until gradually there remains only what was necessary from the beginning:

you yourself and God.

And then, perhaps, not even you.

Only God.