Stages of the Spiritual Life, Part Two
Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh
Translated from Antoine Bloom, Étapes de la vie spirituelle. Préface d’Olga Lossky-Laham. Genève : Éditions des Syrtes, 2022.
Blindness (Mark 10:46–52 and Parallels)
I have already spoken here about Bartimaeus (in 1966), and I don’t intend to go back over what I said then, not because I imagine you remember it, but because I want to speak to you about a different aspect of it. We spoke back then in connection with prayer and the cry of Bartimaeus, who begged for God’s help to be saved from his blindness (Mark 10:46–52).
I believe that one of the reasons we fail to fulfill our calling and find our way is that we do not realize just how blind we are. If we knew we were blind, we might seek healing; we would seek it, as Bartimaeus probably did: first from doctors, then from priests, then perhaps from healers; and having lost all hope, maybe we would turn to God. But the tragedy is that we don’t realize the blindness we are in. Too many things leap to our eyes for us to be aware of the invisible to which we are blind. We live in a world of things, and they impose themselves upon us with their demands and assert themselves: we cannot deny them — they are there. Invisible things do not assert themselves; we must seek them and discover them. The external world demands our attention; God calls to us, speaks to us with timidity.
I remember an old monk who once told me, “Remember that the Holy Spirit is like a great timid bird who wants to land at some distance. When you sense His approach, do not move, do not frighten Him away; let Him draw near.” When he spoke that way, perhaps we might recall the descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove: this image of a great bird that descends timidly and at the same time gives itself is scriptural. We might also remember the words of a Japanese man who once said to me, “In the Christian religion, I think I understand what the Father and the Son are, but I can never grasp the meaning of the Honorable Bird!”
If you want to stay within the realm of such images — of timidity, of a heart that gives itself but does not throw itself away — read again that passage in The Little Prince where the fox describes how he must be tamed. Replace the fox with God, and you will see a loving timidity, a timidity that gives but does not prostitute itself: God does not accept an easy relationship. He does not impose His presence; He offers it, but it can only be received on the same terms — by a timid, loving heart, by two timid hearts that seek one another because they so deeply respect one another, and because both have a sense of holiness, of the extraordinary beauty of mutual love.
The outer world imposes itself; the inner world can be neglected — it never imposes itself. We must seek it with a light and attentive step; we must keep watch for it like a birdwatcher, standing in vibrant silence in the heart of the woods or fields, ready to receive the impression of all that lives around him. But he must also fall silent himself, become imperceptible, be vigilant, alert, and aware. We can only do this insofar as we have become certain, through a primal experience, that there is an inner invisible world — not only around us but penetrating all things with its presence — and that through faith we remain in the certainty that the invisible is real, present, and worthy of being sought beyond, through, and within the visible.
We are ordinarily blinded by the world of things and forget that it does not correspond to the depth of which man is capable. The world of things has opacity, weight, volume, thickness — it has no depth. We may always penetrate to the heart of things, and when we reach their deepest point, it is a terminal point. There is no emergence into the infinite, into immensity: the center of a sphere is its deepest point, but if we try to go beyond it, we return to the surface — its opposite pole. By contrast, Holy Scripture speaks to us of the depth of the human heart. This is not a measurable depth; its very nature is immensity, beyond all measure. This depth is rooted in the immensity of God Himself.
Only when we have understood the difference between a presence that imposes itself and a presence we must seek because we feel its stirring in our hearts — only when have we understood the difference between the heavy, opaque thickness of the world around us and the luminous depth that only God can fill (and I would even say the depth of all creation, whose vocation is to become the place of the divine presence), only then can we begin this search with the awareness that we are blind — blinded by the visible, which prevents us from perceiving the invisible.
The blind man Bartimaeus felt this painfully because his physical blindness deprived him of the visible. If only we could learn to be blind to the visible in order to see beyond, to see in depth, to see the invisible! But even in our current condition — blind as we are to the invisible — we can be deeply connected to God in a way that opens possibilities to us. Bartimaeus was able to cry out to the Lord with all the desperation of his heart, with all the desperate hope he felt as salvation passed before him and was about to escape — because he felt blind and excluded.
The reason we so often cannot cry out to God in that way is that we do not realize how much we are excluded from the only truly real world — rather, the only world that can give full reality to the visible — by our blindness.
To be blind to the invisible, aware only of the sensible world, is to be outside that fullness of knowledge, that experience of total reality which is the world in God and God at the heart of the world. That is where we should begin: by recognizing that in our lived experience, moment by moment, we are not aware of this depth of things, of this immensity, of this eternal vocation of the whole world. Then we could begin where the Gospel calls us to begin: to stand, it says, before a door still shut, and to knock; to stand before a mystery into which we have not yet entered, and to seek, to call, to cry out to God in the certainty that the moment will come when we shall be answered. And I deliberately do not say “heard,” because we are always heard — but we are not always answered. God is not deaf to our prayer, but we are not always capable of hearing God's silence in response to our cry.
If we realized that we are standing before a closed door, we could then both measure our human solitude and recognize how far we still are from our vocation, from the joy to which we are called, from the fullness offered to us by God. And at the same time, and this is very important, we could realize how rich we are in our infinite poverty. We know so little about God, we live so little in Him, and yet how much richness is contained in that spark of presence, of knowledge, of communion that shines in the darkness we are! If the darkness is so full of light, if absence is so rich in presence, if the life that is only just beginning to emerge is already such a fullness — then with what hope, with what rising joy in the heart we can stand before this closed door, rejoicing at the thought that one day it will open, and that when it does, it will be a torrent of life such as we are not yet able to bear.
At the moment we become aware that we are blind and thereby outside the Kingdom, we can take up a real position in relation to the Kingdom and to God, not an imaginary one, the one we constantly inhabit: where we find ourselves in the street but, by imagination, walk through the eternal dwelling; where we try to warm ourselves at the fire burning on the hearth beyond the door; where we attempt already to share in the life that is still beyond our reach by imagining that the spark shining in us is already the Kingdom. It is not yet the Kingdom; it is the pledge of eternal life, it is a promise, it is a call deposited in us so that, with hope and without weariness, we may continue knocking at that door until it opens, seeking the way until it unfolds before us as a narrow path rising toward God.
We do not always need to seek God’s presence in a tangible way. We do not need to expect that God will reveal Himself perceptibly at every moment. The Gospel presents us with several situations showing how far we are from understanding God’s holiness and greatness, how little we are amazed by God, and therefore how easily we take for granted the desire to feel His presence. In truth, we should approach Him with a hesitant heart, asking Him to transform us, to convert us, to make us different before we can hope to stand in His presence. Because every encounter with God, even in a small measure, is already the Last Judgment: to stand face-to-face with the living God is never a neutral act; it always constitutes a krisis — a Greek word that means judgment. We can present ourselves before God and be either condemned or saved according to what we bring in our hearts and what our life testifies to.
This is why the prophets of the Old Testament, of whom many could be quoted, cried out: “Woe is me, for I have seen God; I shall die!” That is more than a human soul can bear, unless that soul, that person, is grafted into the very life of God in Christ.
It is lightly, too lightly, that we seek an encounter prematurely. That is why the whole teaching of the Orthodox Church, in its prayer and in its approach to life, tells us: “Seek no mystical experience. Ask God, in an act of adoration, with all the attention and faith you are capable of, with all the hope you possess, to change you, to make you someone who may one day meet Him.” This is rooted in the Gospel: remember the miraculous catch of fish. Peter welcomed the Lord into his boat; Christ spoke to the crowds, and then commanded His disciples to go out into the deep and cast their nets. Peter said, “We have toiled all night and caught nothing — but at Your word, I will let down the net.” He casts the net, and cannot haul it in. He calls for help from neighboring boats — and only then does he realize, once again (though not definitively, until God reveals to him that Christ is the Son of the living God), that he is in the presence of something, of Someone, greater than anything he can conceive. Reverent fear seizes him. He falls at the Lord’s feet and says, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”
Does that ever happen to us — at moments when prayer has become deep, when we are aware of God, His holiness, His greatness — do we ever say, “Lord, go away, I am unworthy of this closeness You Yourself have initiated”? Don’t we more often try to bring about a closeness that God has not sought, to impose ourselves on Him, to force open a door He has chosen to keep closed?
Remember also the centurion who asked Christ to heal his servant. Christ offered to come, but the centurion said, “Do not trouble Yourself. I too am a man under authority, and when I say to one of my servants ‘Go,’ he goes, and to another ‘Come,’ he comes. It is enough for You to say one word, and my servant shall be healed.”
Is this our attitude? Do we have that awareness, that reverence, that trust in the power of the divine word — that we do not wish to compel Him to come or act in a particular way, but know that one word from Him is enough, and we need nothing more? Do we have the inner certainty that His word is life to those to whom it is spoken?
If only we realized that, because of our blindness, we are outside the Kingdom, outside the Presence, then we could knock at the door, seek the path, cry out to the Lord — not to say, “Open now, I have no patience left; show Yourself to me, I’ve waited long enough!” Yet that is precisely what we constantly do. In twenty-four hours, we find half an hour to give to the Lord, and we are astonished that the moment we say, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” the fullness of the Trinity does not immediately manifest to us!
I believe it is crucial for us to learn how outside we truly are, and how rich we already are in that Presence, in that light hidden within our darkness; to grasp how the possibilities and potentials we carry within us can become inspiration, a path, a hope. It is not urgent to rush — what is urgent is to be real; to take up the true position we occupy in relation to God and the world, the place where God can act — because He cannot act in the false position in which we constantly place ourselves through imagination, fantasy, desire, and spiritual greed, as the Desert Fathers called it.
Then, one of our problems would be resolved. One of the most tormenting aspects of prayer could become a creative act, an act full of meaning: to pray with the sense of God’s absence. Something we so rarely do from a full heart! How often we weep over this absence — yet how rarely do we use it to become real and say: I am blind, I stand behind the door, I am outside. Not outside in the sense of “outer darkness” as in the judgment — but outside as in the opening lines of Genesis, where, at the moment when God creates all things, He draws light out of darkness; and the light of yesterday, the revelation of yesterday, becomes darkness compared to the revelation of today.
To pray in the absence of God, to know that He is there but that I am blind; that He is there but I am infinitely far from Him; to recognize that it is an act of infinite mercy for Him not to make Himself perceptibly present to me when I am still unable to bear that Presence — perhaps this may seem to you even more elusive than what we usually do. But let me repeat, at the risk of going over an example I’ve already shared with some of you last year, the story of a man who came to see me about eighteen years ago.
He was a strong man, someone who had fought hard in life, a practical and grounded man. At the age of forty-five, sitting in a chair across from me, he wept and said: “Father, show me God — I cannot go on living without Him.” I told him I was not able to show him God, but that he needed to ask himself: if God were to appear before him, would he be capable of seeing Him and recognizing Him? And if he were face to face with God, would that moment bring salvation or condemnation?
“How can I know?” he asked. I posed to him a question I often ask: “Is there a passage in the Scriptures that you find perfectly beautiful, that particularly moves you?” Without hesitation he said: “Yes — the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John, the woman taken in adultery. For me, that is the most beautiful passage in the Scriptures.”
If I had left it there, I might have said: Here is a man with a sensitive, deep heart; a man who has grasped one of the most beautiful images in the Gospel. How can it be that, with this inner state, he remains estranged from God? But knowing my own heart, and projecting the inner darkness I see in myself onto him, I asked him: “Well, think for a moment. Who are you in the scene presented by the Gospel? Do you feel, with your whole heart and being, that you are with Christ — full of compassion, infinite understanding — able to see, beyond the exterior darkness of sin, the light in that human being that can burst forth if only given the chance? Are you one of the apostles, full of hope, having already seen how Christ transfigures the Law and transforms situations with a word, a gesture? Are you the adulterous woman, conscious of the death that sin entails, and standing face-to-face with that death, ready to renounce sin forever because, for the first time, she sees the consequences of sin and what it means to be stoned? Are you among the crowd surrounding her — this God-made-man and His disciples? Are you one of the elders, who, aware of their own past, let fall their stones and walk away, shaking their heads? Or one of the young, who believe themselves free from sin, who must reflect long and hard and see the elders leaving, and look at the Lord writing with His finger in the dust at His feet, before finally dropping the stone they hold in their hand, thinking: This could happen to me. She is beautiful. Who are you?”
He thought for a few moments and then answered: “I see myself as the only righteous one who did not leave the presence of that woman and of Christ — and who would have stoned her.”
“Well then,” I said to him, “thank God that you have not yet encountered Him; for He was able to forgive that woman, but He would not have been able to forgive that man!”
If we attentively examine what lies at the bottom of that labyrinth — often dark, sometimes luminous — which is our heart, our conscience, our past, our present, and our impulses toward the future, can we truly say we are ready for an encounter? Can we desire it? Yes — but not for the present moment, unless it is given to us by God; but to will it, and to try to force God into such an encounter — no! That is more than we are able to do. And yet this is what we do constantly, because we are blinded by the visible, unconscious of the invisible; because we lack the sense of wonder, of reverent fear, of the vision that faith gives, of the remembrance left by the passing of Christ, even at a distance. And thus, we ask for more than we can bear.
If only we knew how to appreciate; if only we had thanked God for His absence, which teaches us to knock at the door, to judge our thoughts and the sentiments of our heart, to measure the reach of our actions, to evaluate the stirrings of our whole being, to ask ourselves whether our will is upright, whether it truly tends toward God, or whether we only ask from God a moment of rest in the heart of the storm, so that we may leave Him again the very moment we are rested and have regained our strength, to use once more the energy He has given us, like the prodigal son!
I believe this is important, because unless we start from a point of realism, from a place where we are conscious of things as they are and accept them fully as a gift from God, in response to the situation we are actually in, we will spend our time trying to force a lock, when in truth, that door will unavoidably open.
Saint John Chrysostom says to us: “Find the key that opens your heart. You will discover that this key simultaneously opens the gates of Paradise.” That is where our search must lead. But to do so, we must realize that we are standing before a closed door. If, by our imagination, we place ourselves already within the Kingdom, then we feel no need to knock at that door; no need to seek the door; no need to ask the Lord to open it. And that is precisely what we keep doing! We believe we are inside the Kingdom, and we try to establish a relationship that only belongs to those who are within — while we are still outside.
I am fully aware that I am repeating myself — heavily, incessantly, using the same expressions, the same images — but I believe it is of such enormous importance that we come to realize this condition: it is the foundation and the starting point of all seeking of God. That is why I do not hesitate to say it again.
Metropolitan Elder Anthony Bloom, help us to begin to pray...... 😌✍🏼📙