When Wisdom Makes Us Friends of God

Wisdom begins where the heart ceases to possess

“In every generation she passes into holy souls

and makes them friends of God, and prophets.”

— Wisdom 7:27

“May God grant that I speak with judgment

and have thoughts worthy of what I have received.”

This is where wisdom begins.

Not with knowing.

With receiving.

Before the wise man speaks, he confesses that even his words are not his own.

“We and our words are in his hand.”

The desert understood this.

A man came seeking wisdom and was given silence.

Another sought a word and was told to remain in his cell.

Arsenius possessed the learning of the imperial court. Yet when he asked how he might be saved, he heard:

Flee.

Be silent.

Be still.

He had knowledge.

He needed purity.

There is a knowledge that leaves us unchanged. We can speak about God and never stand before Him. We can know the language of prayer and scarcely pray. We can read the Fathers and remain strangers to the country in which they lived.

The desert has little patience for such things.

It asks one question:

Has the word entered your flesh?

Has it changed the way you live?

Has it made you silent?

Has it made you merciful?

Has it made you free?

“Wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me.”

Not:

I mastered wisdom.

Wisdom taught me.

This is the beginning of the narrow way.

We cease trying to stand above our life and understand it.

We enter it.

We receive it.

We allow God to meet us there.

Much of what we call discernment is fear seeking certainty.

We want to know where the road leads.

We want to know what will remain.

We want assurance that nothing will be wasted.

Wisdom gives none of this.

She gives enough light for obedience.

Then darkness again.

Then another step.

“Free from anxiety.”

Scripture dares to say this of wisdom.

There is something severe in those words.

For anxiety often disguises itself as responsibility. We imagine that if we think long enough, anticipate enough, arrange enough, we can keep life from escaping our hands.

But life has never been in our hands.

“We and our words are in his hand.”

The Fathers knew the freedom of this.

They did not know what tomorrow would bring.

They knew where to stand today.

Before God.

That was enough.

St. Silouan was given a word and spent the rest of his life descending into it.

St. Sophrony learned to stand at the edge of the abyss without fleeing from God.

St. Porphyrios taught souls not to become fascinated by the darkness but to turn toward Christ.

The saints become simple.

Not because life becomes simple.

Because the heart does.

The divided heart wants many things.

The purified heart wants One.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Purity is not merely the absence of sin.

It is the end of duplicity.

The end of bargaining.

The end of arranging our obedience according to the life we would prefer to have.

The pure heart receives the life that is given and looks for God there.

This is harder than going into the desert.

A man may flee into the desert and take his fantasies with him.

He may enter a monastery and remain full of himself.

He may stand through long vigils while secretly desiring another life.

The cell exposes this.

Stay.

Remain.

Do not flee simply because the place has become narrow.

The Fathers knew that the cell eventually reveals what we love.

At first we imagine that we seek God.

Then the silence shows us how many other things we seek with Him.

Recognition.

Security.

Usefulness.

A place.

An identity.

A future.

Even holiness can become another possession.

Wisdom takes these things from our hands one by one.

Not because they are all evil.

Because our hands must become empty.

A clenched hand cannot receive.

“She is a reflection of eternal light,

a spotless mirror of the working of God.”

A mirror does nothing.

It does not create light.

It does not explain light.

It receives it.

Perhaps this is holiness.

To become still enough that the Light is no longer distorted by us.

The world tells us to become something.

The Gospel tells us to die.

The world asks what we will accomplish.

The desert asks what remains when everything unnecessary has been stripped away.

The answer is not an idea.

Christ.

Only Christ.

This is why the ascetical life cannot finally be understood as achievement.

Fasting clears a space.

Silence clears a space.

Solitude clears a space.

Tears clear a space.

The remembrance of death clears a space.

The Jesus Prayer clears a space.

Not emptiness for its own sake.

A place for the Beloved.

“In every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God.”

Friends of God.

There is the whole spiritual life.

Not experts in God.

Not people who have mastered divine things.

Friends.

The friend knows the voice of the beloved.

The friend does not require constant explanation.

The friend does not measure the relationship by usefulness.

The friend remains.

This is what prayer becomes when many words have fallen away.

Presence before Presence.

The Name.

The breath.

The heart standing naked before God.

Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Until the prayer is no longer something we are doing.

Until the Name descends beneath thought.

Until the heart discovers that the One it was calling upon had already entered the room.

Wisdom is there.

Quietly.

“While remaining in herself, she renews all things.”

Notice how God renews.

Often He does not change the place.

He changes the heart within the place.

The cell remains the cell.

The illness remains the illness.

The obedience remains the obedience.

The person before us remains the person before us.

The unanswered question remains unanswered.

But something has changed.

We stop demanding another life.

And suddenly this life becomes transparent.

God is here.

This is the wisdom the desert guards.

Do not despise the place where God has put you.

Do not imagine that holiness is waiting somewhere else.

Do not abandon what has been given because another life appears more beautiful.

Remain until you see.

Remain until the heart stops bargaining.

Remain until prayer becomes simpler than explanation.

Remain until you no longer need to know what comes next.

Then perhaps we begin to understand why Wisdom is said to be more beautiful than the sun.

The sun rises and sets.

Wisdom remains.

The sun illumines the surface of things.

Wisdom enters the heart.

The sun disappears into night.

But against Wisdom,

darkness has no victory.

The desert finally leaves us with very little.

A cell.

A Name.

A little bread.

The person before us.

The day that has been given.

And God.

We once thought we needed more.

Wisdom teaches us otherwise.

And perhaps the truly wise person is simply the one who has finally stopped asking God for another place in which to find Him.

He remains.

He becomes quiet.

And in the poverty of the heart,

he becomes

a friend of God.