When the Words Begin to Die

On the stripping away of speech and the birth of prayer in hiddenness

“Arsenius, flee, be silent, pray always, for these are the sources of sinlessness.”

Abba Arsenius

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There comes a point when solitude stops feeling like refuge and begins to feel like exposure.

At first, the desert appears to protect you. It removes the noise. It removes the constant friction of personalities. It removes the demands. It gives the illusion that now, finally, you can pray.

But then something else begins to happen.

The desert removes what you used to hide behind.

You begin to see how much of your life was sustained by being seen. Even in ministry. Even in love. Even in service. You were known in a certain way. Needed in a certain way. Reflected back to yourself through the eyes of others.

Now that mirror is gone.

And you begin to feel naked.

The psalmist says, “I am become like a pelican in the wilderness. I am like an owl of the desert. I lie awake, and I am like a sparrow alone on the housetop.” Psalm 101

This is not poetry. It is diagnosis.

The soul that enters solitude does not become immediately full of God. It becomes immediately aware of its poverty.

You begin to feel a vulnerability that did not exist before. Prayer no longer feels like an activity. It feels like standing without skin.

Every word you say to God feels insufficient. Every thought feels like noise. Every attempt to grasp Him feels like trying to hold wind in your hands.

And at the same time, people begin to come.

Not because you have anything to give. But because suffering always seeks prayer.

They come with cancer. They come with grief. They come with the collapse of faith. They come with marriages that are dying. They come with despair they cannot name.

And you begin to see the terrible truth.

Your words cannot heal them.

You can speak. You can listen. You can comfort. But the words themselves do nothing.

St. Isaac the Syrian says, “If you love truth, be a lover of silence. Silence, like the sun, will illuminate you in God.”

You begin to understand that prayer is the only real work. Not speaking about God. Not explaining God. Not describing God.

Standing before Him on their behalf.

Holding their names in the fire.

And at the same time, others begin to move away.

Not because they reject you. Not because they are hostile. But because solitude creates distance that words cannot bridge.

You are no longer available in the same way. You are no longer sustained by the same currents. You are no longer moving at the same speed.

And they feel it.

And you feel it.

Christ Himself passed through this narrowing.

“From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more.” John 6:66

This is not failure.

This is purification.

The desert fathers speak with terrifying simplicity because they had nothing left to defend.

Abba Macarius said, “Flee from men and you will be saved.”

He did not mean hatred of men. He meant freedom from the self that exists through men.

Because as long as you are sustained by being understood, you cannot yet be sustained by God alone.

You begin to see something else.

Words begin to feel heavy.

Not because words are evil. But because most words do not come from God.

They come from the need to stabilize yourself. To explain yourself. To reassure yourself that you still exist in a recognizable way.

You begin to feel the violence of unnecessary speech.

The Lord says, “For every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.” Matthew 12:36

This is not a threat. It is a revelation.

Every idle word strengthens the illusion of a self that exists apart from God.

Silence begins to feel like mercy.

St. Arsenius, who had been a man of immense learning and power, said near the end of his life, “I have often repented of having spoken, but never of having been silent.”

Because he had seen what words do.

They scatter the mind. They solidify the ego. They create a world where you remain the center.

But prayer dismantles that center.

Archimandrite Sophrony writes, “The closer man draws to God, the more he sees his own nothingness.”

This is not despair.

This is truth.

And truth burns.

You begin to see the stiltedness of words that do not emerge from prayer. Even your own words begin to feel foreign to you. You hear yourself speaking, and something in you knows this is not yet real.

Not yet born from the deepest place.

The prophet Elijah did not find God in the wind. Not in the earthquake. Not in the fire.

But in the still small voice.

And even that phrase is misleading.

Because it is not a voice in the way we understand voice.

It is presence.

St. Isaac says, “The mouth speaks from the abundance of the heart.”

When the heart has not yet descended fully into God, the mouth still speaks from the surface.

This is why the fathers spoke so briefly.

Not because they preferred brevity.

Because they could no longer tolerate falsehood.

Each word cost them something.

Each word had to emerge from silence or it could not be spoken.

Christ Himself spent thirty years in silence.

Thirty years hidden.

Thirty years not explaining Himself.

And only three years speaking.

And even then, He often withdrew into solitude.

“And He withdrew Himself into the wilderness, and prayed.” Luke 5:16

The Son of God needed silence.

What does that say about you.

What does that say about the necessity of hiddenness.

Archimandrite Zacharias says that when grace deepens, the soul begins to lose the ability to speak about its inner life.

Not because it has nothing to say.

Because it has entered something that cannot survive exposure.

You begin to understand why the Theotokos “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” Luke 2:19

She did not speak.

She bore.

This is the work now.

Not to understand yourself.

Not to describe yourself.

Not to stabilize yourself through reflection.

But to remain.

To stand before God in poverty.

To allow the words to die.

To allow the self that lives through words to die.

Until only prayer remains.

Until even prayer is no longer something you do.

But something you are.

And in that place, hidden from the world and hidden even from yourself, Christ begins to live.

Not as an idea.

Not as an experience.

But as life itself.

And you finally understand why the fathers fled.

Not to escape the world.

But to escape the lie.

To stand where nothing remains but God.