“Why Does Love Take So Long?”

A Dialogue with St. Isaac the Syrian

Disciple: Father, there is something I cannot understand.

You spend so much time laying the foundation before speaking of the mysteries of divine love. You return again and again to humility, silence, repentance, watchfulness, tears, and detachment. You speak fiercely about letting go of attachments, about guarding the heart, about fleeing whatever cools our love for God.

Some who hear you find this severe. They wonder why you cannot simply begin with love.

Why does it take so long to reach the heart of your teaching?

St. Isaac: My child, because love cannot be heard by a heart that has forgotten its own language.

If I speak immediately of divine eros, most will imagine the love they already know. They will hear God through the measure of their own passions. They will make the Infinite serve the finite.

First the eye must be washed before it can behold the light.

Disciple: Then your severity is medicinal?

St. Isaac: Entirely.

No physician begins by praising the beauty of health while ignoring the fever consuming the body.

Nor does one who would teach a child to behold the stars first leave him staring into the smoke of his own fire.

The soul must recover its sight.

Disciple: Yet sometimes your words seem almost impossible.

You tell us to guard the heart from every distraction, every attachment that might divide it.

Why such fierceness?

St. Isaac: Tell me, if a bridegroom stood at the door while his beloved continually turned away to greet every passerby, would you call his grief excessive?

Love is not jealous because it is insecure.

Love is jealous because it knows what communion is.

God desires the whole heart because only the whole heart can receive Him.

Disciple: But are created things not good?

Relationships? Friendships? Family? Beauty?

St. Isaac: They are exceedingly good.

The danger does not lie in creation.

It lies in the heart that asks creation to become what only God can be.

When desire forgets its source, even good things become burdens too heavy for them to bear.

You think you love them.

Often you cling to them because you fear the emptiness within yourself.

Disciple: Then what must happen within us?

Must something break?

Or are we already broken?

St. Isaac: You ask as though these were different questions.

The vessel is already cracked.

But until it is struck by the hand of mercy, it imagines itself whole.

Many walk confidently because they have never seen themselves.

Then love comes.

Or suffering comes.

Or loss.

Or silence.

Suddenly the fractures become visible.

This is not destruction.

This is revelation.

Disciple: Then suffering reveals what was already there?

St. Isaac: Often.

The narrow way is not narrow because God delights in difficulty.

It is narrow because the heart has become crowded.

A room filled with idols has very little space for the Living God.

Every attachment that refuses to surrender whispers the same lie:

“You cannot live without me.”

Only God may speak those words.

Disciple: Is that why you seem to strip everything away?

St. Isaac: I strip away nothing.

Love does.

Have you not seen how fire separates gold from dross?

The fire does not hate the gold.

It loves it.

Everything that cannot survive divine love was never your life.

Disciple: Yet people fear your words.

Especially when you warn against certain relationships or speak so strongly about avoiding occasions that scatter the heart.

Some think you despise human affection.

St. Isaac: Then they have not listened long enough.

I despise nothing that God has made.

I fear only forgetfulness.

There are seasons in which a physician forbids certain foods, not because bread is evil but because the stomach is too sick to receive it.

The beginner must learn how weak the heart is.

The mature learn how free it has become.

Do not confuse the medicine with the destination.

The destination is love.

Always love.

Disciple: Last night you said that we must not judge others but hold ourselves responsible even for another’s fall.

How can such radical humility exist alongside such vigilance?

St. Isaac: Because both spring from the same vision.

The one who has truly seen himself has no leisure to condemn another.

Nor does he trust himself carelessly.

He knows both his poverty and God’s mercy.

He walks gently among others because he has discovered how gently God has walked with him.

Disciple: So the struggle is not against the world?

St. Isaac: No.

Nor against the body.

Nor against other people.

The struggle is against the illusion that life can be found anywhere apart from the embrace of God.

Everything else follows from that.

Disciple: Sometimes I feel discouraged.

The journey seems endless.

The foundation never complete.

The heart never fully healed.

St. Isaac: Does the child complain because the dawn unfolds slowly?

Would you ask spring to become harvest in a single day?

God is never hurried because His purpose is not merely to change your behavior.

He is giving you another heart.

This cannot be accomplished by command.

It happens by communion.

Little by little.

Hiddenly.

Often without your noticing.

Disciple: Then why does it feel as though I lose more than I gain?

St. Isaac: Because you are counting what leaves your hands instead of what enters your heart.

The infant believes the surgeon cruel because he cannot imagine health.

You mourn what is passing.

God beholds what is being born.

Disciple: Father…when will I finally understand all this?

St. Isaac: When you cease trying to possess the truth and allow the Truth to possess you.

The Kingdom is not entered by those who solve its mysteries.

It is entered by those who surrender to Love.

Then everything I have written—from the warnings, to the tears, to the watchfulness, to the fierce guarding of the heart—will no longer appear as burdens laid upon your shoulders.

You will see them for what they always were.

The careful hands of a father preparing a child to receive an embrace so vast that nothing less than the whole heart could bear it.