The Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian - Homily XIX, Part II

There is a danger in reading passages such as this one from St. Isaac and hearing primarily a warning: Do not become negligent. Do not allow yourself to grow lax. Guard your solitude. Avoid unnecessary conversation. Do not permit the mind to become scattered.

Certainly Isaac is warning us. His language is deliberately severe because he knows how fragile the beginnings of prayer can be. A heart newly awakened to God is like the tender blossom of a fruit tree. It possesses within itself the promise of fruit, but it can still be injured by a sudden frost. The mind that has begun to discover stillness can quickly become dispersed again. The heart that has tasted the sweetness of prayer can become strangely cold.

But if we hear only the warning, we may miss something much more beautiful in Isaac’s words.

The great concern of Homily 19 is not simply that we avoid negligence. It is that we recognize what has been given to us and take hold of it.

Isaac is speaking to men and women who have tasted something.

They have tasted God.

“If fiery thoughts arise in you,” he writes, “through the consuming flame of divine things,” and you “enjoy a taste of God,” then guard what has been given to you.

That changes everything.

The ascetical life is not primarily the anxious preservation of spiritual discipline. It is the response of the heart to a gift. We guard prayer because we have discovered Someone in prayer. We seek stillness because within stillness we have begun to hear the voice of the Beloved. We withdraw from unnecessary occupations not because created things are evil, but because something infinitely more precious has begun to draw the heart.

This is why Isaac can speak so dramatically about the loss of fervor.

“Only the man who drinks deeply of this wine, and afterward is deprived of it, only he knows to what misery he has been abandoned.”

One cannot miss the language of desire here.