You
dream of a hermitage. But you already have your hermitage, here and now!
Sit still and call out: ‘Lord have mercy.’ When you are isolated from the rest
of the world, how will you fulfill the will of God? Simply by preserving within
yourself the right inner state. And what is this? It is a state of unceasing
remembrance of God in fear and piety, together with the remembrance of death.
The
habit of walking before God and keeping Him in remembrance—such is the air we
breathe in the spiritual life. Created as we are in the image of God, this
habit should exist in our spirit naturally: if it is absent, that is because we have
fallen away from God. As a result of this fall, we have to fight to acquire the
habit of walking before God.
Our
ascetic struggle consists essentially in the effort to stand consciously before
the face of the ever-present God; but here are also various secondary
activities, which likewise form part of the spiritual life. Here too, there is
work to be done, in order to direct these activities to their true aim.
Reading, meditation, prayer, all our occupations and contacts, must be
conducted in such a way as not to blot out or disturb the remembrance of God.
The
seat of our consciousness and attention must also be concentrated on this remembrance
of God. The mind is in the head, and intellectuals live always in the head. They
live in the head and suffer from unceasing turbulence of thoughts. This
turbulence does not allow the attention to settle on any one thing. Neither can
the mind, when it is in the head, dwell constantly on the one thought of God.
All the time it keeps running away.
For
this reason, those who want to establish the one thought of God within
themselves, are advised to leave the head and descend with their mind into
their heart, and to stand there with ever present attention. Only then, when
the mind is united with the heart, is it possible to expect success in the
remembrance of God.
St.
Theophan the Recluse, The Art of Prayer
Reflection – Well,
perhaps you personally do not dream of a hermitage. St. Theophan was
writing to a nun, his spiritual daughter, who did feel so called. But in a
sense, most of us dream, perhaps, of something anyhow. A little more time to
pray, or a more stable, quieter rhythm of life, or for this or that disruption
or problem to go away so that we can be more focused, less distracted.
The totality and austerity of a
hermitage may or may not be attractive (I confess, it does attract me!), but I
would think most of my regular readers want to be somewhat closer to God, and
would like at least some more time in their lives given for that purpose. The
busyness of life and the paucity of time for prayer is one of the most common
complaints I hear as a priest from my people.
So Theophan’s counsel is spot-on and to
the point. “Sit still, and call out ‘Lord have mercy.’” That’s it, primarily.
The Jesus Prayer (the repeated, silent, rhythmic praying of the sentence ‘Lord
Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner’) is not just
some exotic spiritual practice of the Eastern monks of the desert; it is the
essential movement of the spiritual life encapsulated in that practice.
This is the movement from the head into
the heart that he writes of. That phrase is a key one in Russian
monasticism—put your head in your heart. Catherine Doherty used it frequently
too, along with her famous ‘fold the wings of the intellect, and open the wings
of the heart.’ The problem with the intellect is not the intellect itself—the
intellect is created by God and is good, of course. It is when the intellect is
active disproportionately to its proper function, and displaces the silent
activity and remembrance of the heart, that it needs to be countered.
Thinking is good, and anyone who thinks
the Church is anti-intellectual or has as a general matter and policy
suppressed thought, science, and research simply does not know the history of
human thought in any regard. I would refer you to this blog to remedy that.
But thinking ain’t gonna make us
saints, and if thinking is all we do, we are going to lose our hearts, and the
attentiveness to God that resides in the heart. And by thinking, I don’t just
mean high intellectual philosophy and scholarly work. The intellect is activated
in all sorts of distractions, diversions, speculations, imaginations, idle
chatter. The Internet is a tremendous stimulant to this kind of cheap intellectual
activity, which is why we have to moderate our use of it.
To be attentive to God, mindful of God,
living in his presence and walking before Him continually in a conscious
deliberate way, we need some silence, at least inwardly, and we need to cry out
to Him. The Jesus Prayer may not be the whole of it, but it is a good start,
and that’s where I will leave you today.
