The Prayer of Joy, Desolation, and Abandonment

The principal thing is to stand with the mind in the heart before God, and to go on standing before Him unceasingly day and night, until the end of life.

Igumen Chariton of Valaam

Broken-hearted prayer is slowly teaching me — teaching me the place I can be joyful in the midst of desolation, safe in the midst of mortal danger, sure in the midst of ignorance. Any words of prayer are just a way to walk deeper into this place — a way to warm and awaken the heart. Of course it matters if those words are true. But the real test of whether they are true is not in the working of my mind, but in their power to open the way.

Here, in discussing “truth,” I’m already getting caught up in the world of confusion, but prayer is teaching me a way out of confusion. In this sense, prayer is helplessness and abandonment. I don’t need to know, a hard lesson for someone who loves the beauty of wise words. A hard lesson, but like most hard lessons, a deeply comforting one in the end. Instead of straining to rise above my ignorance, I can sink below it; I can let it go; I can recognize my poverty and allow it. I don’t even need to have faith already in order to do this. Humility, for me, is the gateway to faith, not its precursor. It’s when by grace and providence I can see my nothingness, without blame or judgment, and embrace it rather than fighting it, that the next grace can unfold. This is a gift. Truly all the circumstances of life that lead me to this place of emptiness are a gift.

I am abandoned. By that I mean that prayer is not an exalted state above my life, above my confusion, above my faults, above my suffering. This is why prayer promises a power that the world can’t conquer. It is ready for everything in advance. In prayer I say to everything, I say to every besetting circumstance and every affliction, every tormenting anxiety, every loss, every elation, every ecstasy — “I welcome you, I cannot do anything other than welcome you.” Not as a stratagem, not in a hope that this welcoming can be a means of evasion, but with total sincerity born out of surrender.

In this surrender, I stand before God, as God is mercifully stripping me of pride and anger. I stand before God and I let go of the question of God. In my abandonment, all the mind’s wrestling about God and Providence and suffering and meaning are left behind. I am a naked child. I am not a wise one. I am not pretending to myself or anyone else that I am a wise one. In my desolation, I am standing before God and crying, “Abba!”

The Psalms give voice to this cry with such incomparable depth that I think one who prays them — not reads them, but prays them — will understand why they have been the heart of the church’s worship since the time of the catacombs. They are the first and greatest school of prayer.

As I stand in God’s presence in this abandonment and surrender, love blooms. It is a love mercifully cleansed of so much that accompanies love in my forgetfulness. It is caritas. I lament that the English word “charity” has come to imply a condescending and judgmental attitude towards some unworthy recipient to whom we are generous in our self-righteousness. To me, “charity” now feels like a burning love reaching out with sorrowful, tender compassion for creatures in peril and need and suffering, holding them in God’s presence and longing for their salvation — for their healing, for their deepest life, for their fullest joy. This is the love that is kindled in my heart when prayer allows me to stand before God in abandonment and humility.

The Lord told us: “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it” (St Matthew 16:25). I see and I confess before all that this saying is true. In losing our life — in forsaking what we think is our life — for the sake of God, we find our true life. This is not a truth relevant only to martyrs, confessors, and renunciates. It is the truth of every moment in my life, in every meeting with every creature. This is the prayer to which St Paul referred when he counselled us: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks” (1 Thessalonians 5:17–19).

What happens as I walk in this way, with my mind constrained in my heart, in a charity of abandonment and surrender?

I become open. I become available to everything and to everyone, not in a calculated way, not seeking a result. I say “yes” to what is, even if that includes suffering, even if my heart and my body are wounded.

I lose the illusion that I can justify my faults. I can see those faults without reflexive denial and self-defense. Prayer is the only place I know where my repentance is real, and not a merely verbal formula concealing my isolating self-will.

I become filled with tenderness. According to Abba Isaac of Nineveh, the blind seer whose teachings have fundamentally shaped Eastern Christian spirituality, the merciful heart is on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, and for all that exists. By the recollection of them the eyes of a merciful person pour forth tears in abundance. By the strong and vehement mercy that grips such a person’s heart, and by such great compassion, the heart is humbled and one cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in any in creation. For this reason, such a person offers up tearful prayer continually even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of the truth, and for those who harm her or him, that they be protected and receive mercy. And in like manner such a person prays [even] for the family of reptiles because of the great compassion that burns without measure in a heart that is in the likeness of God (from Homily 81 of the Ascetical Homilies of St Isaac the Syrian.)

I become able to pray for others, holding them with this charity in my heart as I stand before God. My love for them feels like an offering of my life’s blood. Rather than asking for things, I am simply pouring out my love and my longing and my sorrow and my thanksgiving like an oblation on the altar of my soul.

I become able to forgive others and I forget wrongs done. I sink below the affronts, slights, and wounds and find the desire kindled in my heart that my enemies be healed of whatever afflicts them and that they find salvation and fulness of life.

I find a boundless gratitude for all created things and for my own life. The primal beauty and rightness of creation is mercifully revealed as its deepest truth, even in the midst of suffering. Every created thing comes to me as a gift, shining with a light I cannot grasp.

It’s impossible to characterize this prayer as sorrowful or joyful; the Orthodox phrase “bright sadness” is one attempt to describe it. It feels like a taste, an earnest in the beautiful old language of the King James, of the life to come — of Heaven.

I know that this is the way of Jesus. In Jesus, God has become a human being, in flesh and blood, radically vulnerable, radically abandoned. His burning charity is revealed not just as the root of Creation, but as an ever-flowing and almighty tenderness meeting us in every place of our exile, carrying us back home. Prayer is the heart of how I follow him and keep close to him, so that by God’s grace, I may be found one day where he is. In the end, prayer is his life in me, and my own true life.

It is also the way of Mary, the Mother of God, whose human prayer was so deep that it opened her body to receive the divine logos and give it flesh in this world. And her prayer is still this deep and this unfailing, even for me.

In the world of confusion, outside the life of prayer, all kinds of questions and discussions and concerns arise. Shouldn’t I care for myself? How can I be of service to others if I don’t establish myself first of all? Isn’t self-assertion a crucial good that traditional spirituality has neglected, producing a host of distortions — from body and sex negativity, to the acquiescence of women, children, the poor and the marginalized to injustice and cruelty? Those are just the beginning; the mind’s questions to the heart concerning spiritual things go as deep and as far as I can see.

These questions are real. The desire for answers to them is a deep, deep hunger. However provisional or final the answers we find, I know this: if I address the questions without humbling into the depths of prayer, those answers won’t lead to life for me, or for others, or for creation.

Slowly, a single, central spiritual criterion has awakened in me: if a book, a thought, a lifestyle choice, an activity leads me away from prayer; if it deadens my heart, rather than enlivening it; if it darkens my vision, however subtly, of the truth of my state and of the love of God that courses through creation like fire; then I should pass it by. And I should seek out whatever strengthens me and confirms me in prayer.