When You Fall Like a Sack of Straw

Father Charbel Abernethy
Feb 9
4 min read

On the Refusal of the Heart and the Prayer That Begins in Weakness

“Could you not watch with Me one hour?”

Matthew 26:40

There is a moment at the end of the day when the truth about your heart is revealed.

Not when you are strong. Not when prayer flows easily and the mind is clear. Not when the soul burns with longing and the Name of Jesus rises effortlessly from the depths.

But when you are exhausted. When your body aches. When your thoughts collapse inward. When you feel emptied of all strength and all desire.

This is the moment when the heart shows what it loves.

Because there, in that moment, you stand before a choice that no one else sees. You can turn toward God in your poverty or you can turn toward yourself in your weariness.

Most often, we turn toward ourselves.

We do not say this openly. We do not announce it. We simply collapse. We fall into our bed like men already dead. We tell ourselves that we have done enough. We have worked. We have endured. We have suffered the demands of the day. We deserve rest.

And so the day ends without God.

Not without His presence, because He was there. He was watching. He was waiting. He was standing at the door of the heart as He always does.

But without our offering.

This is the terrible truth. God gives Himself without measure, and we give Him what remains after we have given ourselves to everything else.

St. Isaac the Syrian says that the one who loves God reproaches himself even in his rest because he knows he has not yet loved enough. Not because God is cruel, but because love cannot be satisfied with partial offering. Love presses toward totality. Love cannot bear to withhold itself.

But we withhold ourselves constantly.

We withhold the last word of prayer. We withhold the last turning of the heart. We withhold the final movement of gratitude.

We preserve a small territory for ourselves where God is not allowed to enter.

This is why Christ came to His disciples in Gethsemane and found them sleeping.

They were not evil men. They loved Him. They had left everything for Him. They had followed Him into poverty, humiliation, and uncertainty.

But when the decisive hour came, when love demanded that they remain with Him in His agony, they slept.

Exhaustion exposed the limits of their love.

And exhaustion exposes the limits of ours.

The fathers say that the final struggle of the monk is not against sin but against indifference. Not against passion but against forgetfulness. Not against desire but against the quiet decision to live without reference to God.

Because there is something in us that wants relief more than communion.

We want to exist without demand. We want to lay down the burden of love. We want to be free from the gaze of God.

This is what it means to fall like a sack of straw. It is not merely physical exhaustion. It is spiritual consent to absence.

It is the heart saying, without words, I will return to You tomorrow.

But tomorrow is not ours.

St. John Climacus says that the remembrance of death cuts through laziness like a sword. Not because death terrifies, but because it clarifies. One day there will be no more evenings. One day there will be no more opportunities to turn toward Him in weakness. One day the final offering will already have been made.

And what will remain is only what was given.

Archimandrite Zacharias reveals something terrible and beautiful here. He says that at the very moment when we feel most incapable of prayer, the deepest prayer becomes possible.

Not the prayer of strength, but the prayer of truth.

Not the prayer that rises from fervor, but the prayer that rises from poverty.

When the soul stands before God and says, Lord, I have nothing. I cannot even pray. I cannot even love You as You deserve.

This prayer is more precious than all the others.

Because it is real.

It contains no illusion. No self confidence. No hidden pride.

It is the prayer of the publican who could not lift his eyes to heaven.

It is the prayer of Peter after he denied Christ.

It is the prayer of the thief who had nothing left but his last breath.

The fathers say that God does not seek prayer from us because He needs it. He seeks it because it allows Him to give Himself.

When the heart confesses its poverty without fleeing, without numbing itself, without collapsing into sleep, something opens. Something breaks. Something yields.

And the Spirit enters.

Suddenly, strength appears where there was none. Words appear where there was silence. Love appears where there was only emptiness.

This is the hidden energy Zacharias speaks of.

It does not belong to us. It is the life of Christ rising within the ruins of our weakness.

St. Paul says, “When I am weak, then I am strong.”

Not because weakness itself has power, but because weakness strips away the illusion that we are the source of our life.

This is why the enemy fights so hard at this precise moment. He does not fear your strength. He fears your poverty offered to God.

Because when you pray in weakness, you cease to rely on yourself.

And when you cease to rely on yourself, God becomes your life.

This is the narrow way.

It is not dramatic. It is not visible. It is fought in silence, at the edge of sleep, when no one sees and no one knows.

It is fought in the decision to turn toward Him one last time.

To whisper His Name once more.

To offer Him the ruins of your strength.

Christ did not save the world from comfort. He saved it from exhaustion. He saved it from abandonment. He saved it from the moment when every human strength had failed.

He hung on the Cross when His body was broken, when His strength was gone, when every natural power was exhausted.

And there, in absolute weakness, He gave everything.

This is why He asks the same of us.

Not perfection.

Everything.

Not strength.

Faithfulness.

Not fervor.

Truth.

The heart that turns toward Him in exhaustion enters into the mystery of His Cross.

And there, in that place of weakness freely offered, the life of God begins.