Discovering and Living in the Heart
The Experience of Grace, the Period of its Withdraw, and the Perfection of Man
The quality and truth of man’s existence depend on his ability to locate and live within his heart. Man’s spiritual heart (nous) coinheres with his physical heart and is located in the same “place,” though the two are not identical. It is within this “‘place’ in the deep heart…[that] God communicates with man”1 and where the new man is born (cf. John 3; Colossians 3:10), renewed, and raised up to commune with God. But modern man is largely ignorant of his heart; he lives a vacuous life, spending his time in worldly pursuits—in vain attempts to “fill this emptiness which is inside of him…he tries hard to fill this abyss, but he cannot.”2 He neglects his heart and sells his soul in order to purchase things of the world, dispersing his being amongst his material pursuits and worldly cares. This produces in him a lie, an internal monologue of the passions that leads to confusion and death, instead of the fulfillment of life, peace, and joy that he seeks.3
If a man wishes to live truly, to satisfy the abyss of desire in himself, and become a true hypostasis (and thus be saved), he must endeavor to know God, and in order to know God he must descend—first in a quest to discover his heart, and secondly in obedience to the cross—that he might receive the promise and ascend, together with and in Christ, to God. This matter of double descent and then resurrection outlines the three basic stages of the spiritual life: man must first come to himself and descend into his heart. When he does this, God will shower him with grace, allowing him to taste the final stage while he is still in the first. Then, God withdraws His Grace that man might show his fidelity in the midst of struggle and prove himself to be His child, and finally, after all these things, man is begotten as a son of God, becomes a true hypostasis, and enjoys eternally the grace of God.
Discovering and Returning to the Heart
The journey to the heart is dangerous and man must risk everything if he is to take it. Though fraught with dangers, the journey is necessary for it is the only one capable of inaugurating man into True life, enabling him to be a “partaker of the Divine Nature” (2 Peter 1:4) and thereby become a true hypostasis. The man who would endeavor upon this journey must do so with sobriety, aware that he “will inevitably be threatened by the danger of losing his way at the crossroads, of going astray and perishing while under the illusion that he is working out his salvation” for his “sinful inclinations…are capable of presenting things to [him] in a false light, and deceiving and destroying him.”4 In recognition of this danger, man must constantly seek to stoop lower in humility and repentance, leveraging everything in his life to acquire, by God’s grace, these two states of being.
The quest to enter the heart and find God begins when man comes back to himself. That is, when he gathers his being, which has been dispersed amongst his worldly activities and vain pursuits, and stands in his heart in humility before God.5 Man is compelled to make this return to the heart when he suffers and is reminded of death. After he returns he must not be content to stay in the mire but he, like the prodigal son, must “drive away procrastination”6 and “arise and go—meaning that he intends to stop his former way of life.”7 This change of direction in his life is the state of repentance, and compels him to begin his ascetic work by denying himself “pleasures and enjoyments”8 and by “lay[ing] aside all earthly cares.”9 In the beginning, when man makes the slightest effort, the Father runs to him, clothes him in the robe of absolution and then “set[s] the table for him (the Holy Eucharist).”10
Man’s heart is set alight by repentance and his heart burns within him with a sense of urgency, as he recognizes the immanence of his death and the Lord’s judgement. This mindfulness of death “is a deep knowledge, accompanied by a wondrous sensibility of the heart, which perceives clearly ‘the futility of any and every acquisition on the earth.’”11 In humility, man recognizes his utter uselessness to attain to salvation and the vanity of his previous life, and thus cries out to God in “anguish like that of a woman in childbirth. In the feelings of his heart, he touches to a certain extent the punishments of hell.”12 Saint Theophan notes that, “this state is painful but salutary. It is so unavoidable that one who has not experienced such a painful change has not yet begun to live through repentance.”13
The burning and dread sensation of man’s personal hell of his uncultivated heart compels him to repent of his sins and bear shame before his priest and before God in confession. Initially, man may only feel shame before the priest who stands as a witness to his confession. But as man progresses in repentance through bearing shame and moves from the fear of man to the fear of God he will speak directly to God in confession, all but forgetting about the priest. In this manner, man weeps before God whom he clearly perceives to be sitting on His throne as judge. When this happens, man is filled with a radical disregard, even disgust, of the things that used to dominate his desire. The things offered by the world become, for him, a “vanity of vanities” (Ecclesiastes 1:2) and his concentration shifts. He is now focused on prayer and repentance, which “is characterized by a painful change of will;”14 It is in this activity that he finds God, for “the discovery of the heart is the beginning of man’s salvation.”15 He who experiences this initial pain should take courage, for, “when [he] has endured patiently all the preliminary trials of the spiritual life, then sooner or later God will visit him.”16
The First Stage of the Spiritual life: The Initial Visit of God’s Grace
When God sees man on the road of repentance He, like the Father of the Prodigal Son, rushes out to embrace him. That is, at some point, God makes himself known to man and floods his soul with grace. In this beginning stage, the initial visitation of grace allows man to easily rise in the morning with prayer already on his lips. During prayer, he experiences an inner warmth which may remain with him the entire day along with a ceaseless, internal repetition of the Jesus Prayer. He may also recognize from afar the fiery arrows of temptation when they are first launched and, before they find a resting place within him, he is able to step out of the way and allow them to pass by without engaging them. As he journeys down, deeper and deeper within himself, he experiences submersion in the deep heart and perceives it as an entire world within himself where his prayers echo in desperation before God. These are what we might hesitantly call continuous or daily characteristic of the first grace, when man “cannot stop praying” and his “heart is active even in sleep.”17 For the man in this stage, “it is easy to love, easy to believe and easy to keep vigil”18 and “in some people this initial grace is equal to the perfect measure of the Saints.”19 But in order to preserve it, at least for as long as is possible in the beginning stage, he must remain watchful in a “a continual fixing and halting of thought at the entrance of the heart.”20
If man is watchful and maintains this grace, God may visit him in a mystical way. Paradoxically, this often takes place in a state of complete brokenness before God, as he sheds countless tears in recognition of his sinful state. Man, in this state, may feel himself descending lower and lower until his heart is completely wounded by the repetition of the Jesus Prayer. Then, when it seems he is at his very lowest, God deigns to visit him; man experiences, all at once, an enlargement in his burning heart and a sense that someone coming down, from above, to meet him; this sense pierces down into his the heart, as God condescends to meet him in his lowest hell, and then raises him up out of himself into a place of bliss, where he perceives the love and consolation of God. Such an experience will work to deepen man’s faith in, and love for, God, though such consolation will by no means stifle the tears from his eyes and the repentance in his heart. Man in this first stage is unworthy of such experiences, as he has not struggled to acquire them. In this first stage especially,
God can be very lenient. Man experiences the spiritual comfort and joy that attend the first grace. And although he is still impure, weak and ignorant, grace does not cease to delight his heart and push him onward – precisely because of his ignorance. God is merciful, and He wants to first of all teach us the great lesson of how His grace works in the soul.21
When this happens, man has grappled with the first degree of faith, an “introductory faith.”22 which “turns his being unto God, instils [sic] within him the fear of God and lays hold of his heart.”23
However, man should not slacken his work. He must press further into his heart in repentance, lest he think that he has accomplished anything. For, in fact, he has accomplished nothing; this grace “does not yet belong to man . . . [it is] like an investment of spiritual capital.”24 That is, man experiences the burning in his heart, that unmistakable “inner wounded place of the chest”25 where Christ comes to dwell and burn within him, as a provision for the next stage. This is the initial stage of the Christian life and it’s purpose is without question: to prepare man for the next stage of the spiritual life, when God’s grace is withdrawn from the soul that man might prove his fidelity to Him.
The Second Stage: The Withdrawal of God’s Grace
The initial visit of God’s grace “lasts from anything between a few hours or days to a maximum of seven years.”26 Regardless of how carefully man guards the grace given to him, “it is bound to come to an end…Then it is time for the struggle that is the second stage to begin.”27 In the second stage, man experiences an increase of trials, temptations, bodily illness, and the seeming absence of God. Having just experienced the sweetness of God, the “withdrawal of grace is experienced as a kind of death, an ontological vacuum”28 in which man writhes in agony over his loss. He struggles to catch a breath above the torrent of waves that surround him. It is difficult for him to wake and to maintain his focus during prayer, difficult to obey the Lord’s commandments, and he experiences an inner turmoil where peace once reigned. During this stage, he may experience seeds of doubt and dangerous thoughts about his priest, the church, and his acceptance in the community.
Man in the second stage discovers that there are two kinds of despair: despair unto death and, what Elder Zacharias calls “charismatic despair,”29 whereby man recognizes at the core of his being the transience of his earthly life and vain pursuits. This is the second degree of faith when “man hangs everything on the mercy of God”30 and “hopes against hope.”31 If the man who has tasted the goodness of God is unaware of the second stage and its purpose when he enters it, he will be in danger of falling into despair and experiencing the hell of absence eternally. Thus, it is vitally important that man recognizes the three stages of the spiritual life—especially the second stage —and their purpose, that he might be renewed in his struggle to “endure to the end” (Matthew 24:13).
The second stage, then, is the stage of the cross; it is a stage where man is beaten, stretched, and pierced. And after all of that he, just like Christ, must stoop even further and descend into hell. He experiences every moment as a new crucifixion, for “every day and every hour the proof of [his] love for God is demanded of [him] through warfare and struggle against temptations.”32 The pains of death that man feels pulsing within him are a safeguard for him and given out of the wondrous foreknowledge of God for the purpose of his salvation. For if man attempts to ascend to God without first “patient endurance of the tribulations of the flesh”33 then “wrath come[s] upon him, because he did not first ‘mortify his members which are upon the earth,’ that is, heal the infirmity of his thought by patient endurance of the labor which belongs to the shame of the cross.”34
The second stage is a vital part of man’s spiritual journey, when he either wrestles with, and sheds, the old man or rejects the new man by his rejection of the cross; he must, “choose one or the other: either crucify Christ and perish eternally, or be crucified together with Christ and share eternal life with him.”35 The withdrawal of grace enables God to root out the passions in man, if man is willing, and to propel him toward salvation, readying him for eternal life with Himself. Saint Isaac the Syrian attributed great weight to the pain of the cross, noting that, “without harsh tribulations of the flesh it is difficult for untrained youth to be held under the yoke of sanctification.”36 It is in this stage that we can make the most progress, for progress can be made with but the slightest utterance of thanksgiving to God for his provision, even in times of struggle.
Throughout the second stage, God will be sure to encourage man with pockets of grace, little oasis’ in the desert, as he struggles to persevere. On this point, man’s perseverance in this stage is most important. In his perseverance, he should “remember [his] first love” (as the title of Elder Zacharias’s book, taken from Revelation 2, reminds us) and the goodness of God showered upon him in that first stage and look to it as a goal. In this stage, and throughout man’s spiritual life, remembrance is a vital part of man’s ability to persevere; for through remembrance—of his first love and the grace showered upon him, as well as his participation in the remembrance (anamnesis) of the liturgical life, particularly in the Divine Liturgy—he opens a canister in which he has stored the grace of God and, in this way, drinks and experiences the grace again, renewing him in his struggle to persevere.
The Third Stage: The Perfection of Man
When man successfully navigates the second stage, standing firm in the face of great temptations as well as spiritual and physical struggles of many kinds, he convinces God that he is His. It is then that man,
Having passed through the first two degrees of faith (introductory faith and charismatic faith combined with charismatic despair), and having attained the faith wherein [his] inner stability reflects the fidelity of the just, [he] will have convinced God that [he is] His, and He will answer [him] and His word remains forever. God will speak His word to man and enter into a final covenant of love with him and, as we know from Scripture, His covenant is eternal.37
Having persevered, “the penitent has now convinced God that he belongs to Him in accordance with the words of the Prophet, ‘I am thine, save me’ (Ps. 118:94). And the Lord replies, ‘Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee’ (Ps. 2:7).”38 Then, the grace that initially visited man returns, this time permanently, and he experiences firsthand what Saint Paul meant when he said, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). Man is then looked upon as a luminous, living human being, “a mark for his generation.”39 For this “opening up of his heart signifies the healing of his personhood, for he is now spiritually reborn and has been adopted by the Father Who is without beginning.”40
Unfortunately, this third stage, though meant for every human being, is not experienced by many, for it is the stage of the perfect, the stage of “sainthood.” Indeed, this grace-filled stage is the purpose (telos) for which man was created; he was created to lived in communion with God and to hear Him say, “all that I have is thine” (Luke 15:31). This calling to perfection (cf. Matthew 5:48) should awaken in man a desire to struggle severely and so attain to his purpose: to move from the image to the likeness of God and actualize his personhood, thereby becoming a true person.
Conclusion
Elder Zacharias calls man to achieve his, “one and only true calling: to become like unto Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”41 In order to do this, man must gather his fragmented being and return to himself. When he does this he begins his journey to salvation. Aiding him on this journey are the grace-filled states of mindfulness of death, repentance, and humility. In the first stage, God will visit man and fill him with an abundance of grace, allowing him to pray and remain watchful in a manner beyond his own capacity. But after a period of time, God withdraws His grace, that man might struggle and endure various trials for the sake of his salvation. When man has stood firm in the midst of everything, particularly in his solitary effort to persevere and remain faithful to his first love, the grace of God revisits man and inaugurates him into the third stage of perfection. Man does not reach the third stage by being perfect in himself. Rather, he reaches it by remaining faithful amidst the onslaught of trials, temptations, and struggles that attempt to beset him. Above all, he must remain resolute in his desire for God, constantly seek him, and, as many times as he catches himself drifting away, he must come back to himself, descend into the heart. For it is there that he will find the Kingdom of God (cf. Luke 17:21).
Archimandrite Zacharias, Man the Target of God, p. 9.
Saint Theophan the Recluse, Turning the Heart to God, p. 5
Cf. Archimandrite Sergius, Acquiring the Mind of Christ, p. 12
Saint Theophan, op. cit., p. xl.
Ibid, p. 50.
Ibid, p. 44.
Ibid, p. xl.
Ibid, p. 49.
Ibid, p. 50.
Ibid, p. 11.
Archimandrite Zacharias, Hidden Man of the Heart, p. 20.
Ibid, p. 2.
Ibid.
Saint Theophan, op. cit., p. 2.
Archimandrite Zacharias, Hidden Man of the Heart, p. 21.
Archimandrite Zacharias, Man the Target of God, p. 16.
Archimandrite Zacharias, Remember Thy First Love, p. 45.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 46.
Hesychios the Priest, Ascetical Homilies, p. 163.
Archimandrite Zacharias, Remember Thy First Love, p. 34.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 23.
Ibid, p. 45.
The Watchful Mind, p. 42
Archimandrite Zacharias, Remember Thy First Love, p. 47.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 38.
Ibid, p. 35.
Ibid, p. 27.
Ibid, p. 30.
Saint Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies, p. 483.
Ibid, p. 123.
Ibid.
Saint Theophan, op. cit., p. 59.
Saint Isaac the Syrian, op. cit., p. 122.
Archimandrite Zacharias, Remember Thy First Love, p. 35.
Archimandrite Zacharias, Hidden Man of the Heart, p. 78.
Ibid, p. 9.
Ibid, p. 78.
Archimandrite Zacharias, Remember Thy First Love, p. 35.
Don’t know if you check these comments from older posts, but I am looking into Orthodox Christianity for the first time I am astounded at what I’m reading here. I have a completely different background and have myself written something almost identical, and read some books from my same background who have written the same. This gives me something to think about the next couple weeks. Thank you
This is an excellent summation of the three stages of the spiritual life. I'm currently reading "Remember Thy First Love" By Archimandrite Zaccharias (slowly!). I suspect I've hit the 2nd stage a couple of times in the past, but not understanding, I shrunk back into the illusory comforts of sin. Thankfully, God, in His great mercy, rescued me and set me back on the path. Feeling the pains of stage 2 again now, but with a better understanding of what's going on. Lord have mercy.