In the Desert of the Heart

On the desire to abolish myself

‘For see, you were inside, and I was outside, but I sought you there. Unlovely, I rushed without thinking among the things of beauty you made. You were with me, but I was not with you.’

St Augustine of Hippo

Sometimes it is difficult for me to write anything, because all I want to do is to be quiet. I have wanted this for years, and sometimes I achieve it, but it is fleeting. Maybe less fleeting by the year, though. Maybe the pull is growing, and the will and the ability. Growing slowly, like moss on a stone.

‘If anyone wants to learn the will of God’ said the Russian Orthodox priest Father Alexander Men, in one of his Lenten sermons¹, ‘let him seek silence.’ Christians have known this forever. They have fled to deserts and caves, monasteries and sketes. They have taken up residence on the tops of pillars and in the boles of hollow trees. They knew that the voice of God was both still and small² and could only be heard in silence, would only settle in a peaceful heart.

Silence - or at least, quiet; peace – is the natural environment of the Spirit of God, it seems, and we live in the world which appears purposefully designed to make this a great struggle. The roar of traffic, the planes crossing the skies, the hum of the electric wires, the black rectangles in our pockets which fragment our attention, stimulate our passions and take us anywhere but the place where we stand. Whatever the world is it makes silence, or even quiet, almost an impossibility. That means we cannot hear God. And when we cannot hear God, we are lost.

Most of us will never get the opportunity to live in the bole of a hollow tree, and probably wouldn't much like it if we did. But it is possible to be distracted by outward appearances. If you live in the middle of a city, a desert or a forest may seem an attractive haven of peace, but of course it is possible to flee to the wilderness and take your restless, neurotic, world-tangled heart with you. Probably it is quite common. Silence, a peaceful heart, the landing strip of the Holy Spirit, is not achieved simply by fleeing external noise, though this certainly helps. Most of the noise comes from within.

Last Sunday was the second Sunday of Lent in the Orthodox Church. Each Lenten Sunday is built around a different theme, usually around one of the Church Fathers or a story from the Gospels, each designed to take us deeper into what is sometimes called the ‘bright sadness’ of the Lenten descent. The second Sunday is dedicated to the memory of St Gregory Palamas, the fourteenth-century monk who is celebrated in the Orthodox Church for his defence of the spiritual tradition of ‘hesychasm’, which today forms the core of the contemplative spirituality of the Christian East.

Hesychasm is one of those Greek words often encountered in Christian Orthodoxy which has no direct English translation; it is usually rendered as ‘stillness’. Hesychastic prayer is the pursuit of inner stillness, not for its own sake, but because this is the opening move of the entire purpose of Orthodox Christian spirituality, which is to seek theosis. This is another one of those Greek words, usually translated as ‘union with God.’ Theosis, according to the hesychasts, is achieved in silence, through solitary prayer and living, the aim of which is to offer up a peaceful heart for the Holy Spirit to dwell within. ‘The Holy Spirit is extremely meek,” wrote the Coptic monk Matthew the Poor. ‘He finds no rest in cries and confusion, or in a heart that is cruel, unjust, wrathful, irascible, or proud.’³ Hesychasm seeks to create the conditions for the Spirit to settle in our hearts; something He can only do if our hearts are at peace.

St Gregory Palamas is celebrated for the intellectual battle he waged in the early 1300s with an Italian Orthodox monk named Barlaam, who had visited Mount Athos, seen the practice of hesychasm at first hand and been scandalised by it. Barlaam, it is said, had been trained in the Western Scholastic tradition, and was horrified by what today he might call the ‘woo’ of Eastern Christian mysticism. He nicknamed the hesychasts omphaloscopoi, our third Greek word of the day, which translates as ‘navel gazers’. Barlaam thought that the hesychasts were deluded and blasphemous; a position I still hear occasionally today from some Protestants. St Gregory took him on, and his defence of hesychasm won the day in the East. In the process, he helped cement its place at the heart of Orthodox spirituality, where it remains today.

The practice most commonly associated with the hesychastic tradition is that of the Jesus Prayer, which all Orthodox Christians - and plenty of non-Orthodox ones for that matter - are familiar with, and which many of us practice daily, either in the boles of trees or in suburban homes before work or after dinner. It is not, of course, necessary to live in a desert or on Mount Athos to pursue inner silence, though again it may help. It is probably not true that it can be found as easily in the midst of a megacity as it can in a forest, at least for most of us: the temptations, and the distractions, are simply greater, which is why people flee in the first place. Still, the principle is clear, and is much enunciated by the Fathers of the Christian Church: the Spirit of God will only settle in a peaceful heart. Outer peace makes it easier to achieve inner peace, but it doesn’t create it. Inner peace is achievable in central London, just as neurotic self-obsession is possible in a desert cave.

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This subject has obsessed me for years: the subject of silence, of stillness. I once wrote a book about the need to pursue it, and the difficulty of pursuing it as a writer. That book, Savage Gods, was a work of neurotic self-obsession if ever there was one, but it worried away at a question that had grown in me for years. It first arose, I think, when I began practicing Chan Buddhism at the age of forty: a practice which turned out to be a gateway drug to Eastern Christianity, just as soon as I was able to ask Christ to open the gate for me. Buddhism, like hesychasm, begins with the search for inner stillness, which it sees as a necessary precursor to understanding the delusions we tend to call ‘reality.’ This is entirely in accordance with Christian teaching, and indeed with modern understandings of human psychology.

The thing is, once you begin to examine those delusions, you see that one of the most pernicious is the construction of a self-identity. This is necessary to survive in the world, probably, but soon enough it becomes a yoke around the neck. This construction labelled ‘Paul Kingsnorth’, for example, now has a public reputation as a writer with certain opinions and a particular history. His future work, and indeed his income, is in some way reliant on keeping this fiction going. It is not a ‘fiction’ in the sense of it being a deliberate falsehood, but it is a construction, which means it is a story, which means that the actual me has ended up stuck inside it, as we all do with our stories in the end.

Things are particularly bad for this ‘Paul Kingsnorth’ character, because he makes his living writing articles like this one. Not only does he need to do this to eat, but more existentially, he has written for so long that he now sees the world almost entirely through the lens of the written word. Even if he wasn’t getting paid to write things down, he would be writing them down anyway, which would just continue to encrust the artificial world around the artificial self, and make it harder to escape from both.

Whether we are writers or not, we create these personal fictions we call ‘identities’, and the older we get, the harder it is for that simple, primal stillness which is the precursor to true prayer to break back through. Back when I practiced Buddhism, I remember seeing with crystal clarity, at a level far deeper than the intellect, that if I wanted to progress spiritually I had to stop pumping out all these words. This was not because language itself was inherently bad - it is hardly avoidable - but because of something at once fuzzier and clearer, which even now I find it hard to explain. It was that words were part of the fiction of the world. It was so clear then - and it remains clear now - that spiritual progress, that work of theosis, requires us to drop all of our illusions. To smash through the cement of words and concepts and identities and opinions. To see ourselves naked before God. To make ourselves simple again.

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Jesus, in more than one of the Gospels, talks about children, and what they have to teach us. In Luke’s Gospel⁴, when the disciples attempt to shoo away groups of parents who want him to bless their babies, Jesus rounds on them. ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them’, he says, ‘for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’

In Matthew’s Gospel, meanwhile, the disciples are jostling amongst themselves to achieve Jesus’s favour - or perhaps they are just anxious for some clear guidance. ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ they ask Him.⁵ In response, Jesus calls a child over to them. ‘Truly I tell you,’ he says, ‘unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’

The ‘kingdom of heaven’, then, belongs to those who ‘become like little children’. In fact, unless we ‘change’, and learn to ‘receive the kingdom of God like a little child’, we will ‘never enter it.’ Jesus says this twice, and very emphatically. What does it mean?

Simplify, I think. To become childlike means to return again to the state in which God created us. To drop those self-created ‘personalities’. Children do not have strong opinions about the world. They do not - yet - have self-created egos which will trap them. They tend to move through the world wide-eyed, and to accept its magic. To become like a child is also to become like the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, a pair of striking images which Jesus uses elsewhere to urge his followers away from complexity and towards simplicity;⁶ away from words and towards experience; away from noise and towards silence.

I have been struck repeatedly over the years by the fact that some of my favourite Christian saints were ‘uneducated’ people, in the world’s terms. The holiest of them, those who practiced straightforward Christian love with no frills, so often seem to have barely attended school. Some of them could barely read. I don’t think this is a coincidence.

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In his little book Do You Know Yourself?⁷, a collection of talks on Christianity and psychology, the late Fr Symeon Kragiopoulos, a Greek Bishop with a reputation as a ‘profound anatomist of the soul’, anatomises those of us who have what he calls ‘complications’ within: a description which I would guess applies to most modern people, and perhaps most pre-modern ones as well. ‘Someone who has complications within him, who has been blocked internally … can't live the spiritual life,’ he writes, starkly.

‘The harm that has happened to humanity,’ he goes on to say, ‘and particularly to contemporary humanity – that is, to us – it's so great that in our effort to disentangle the complications that exist inside us we tangle them up even more.’ Humans, he says, begin life with ‘this blue sky in their souls, this clear heaven, this purity and holiness.’ In the beginning we are children, as Jesus tells his disciples to be again. But we complicate everything as we grow, with our stories, with our egotistic scrabbling, with all the stuff of life from which there is no escape. We build necessary shells to protect ourselves, and ‘the heaven of [our] souls is clouded and darkened.’ This is what it means to be ‘Fallen.’

What can help us, then? Christianity we say - if we are Christians, that is - but Fr Symeon is not convinced. ‘I'd dare to say that even Christianity is getting tangled up inside us and is itself getting mixed up,’ he says. Those of us who call ourselves ‘Christians’ do not have the simple, childlike souls we are called to embrace. ‘In the final analysis,’ he says, ‘while a person is Christian, while he believes in the Gospel, while he believes in Jesus Christ, while he confesses and receives communion, he is blocked.’ The blockage comes from the fact that so many of us are influenced more by ‘the spirit of western Christianity, which we perhaps call Christian civilisation, than by the Christianity of the Gospel and the Fathers, by that Christianity that really redeems a human being, that cleanses man and releases him from all those parasites and from all those pitfalls and makes it pure and clean.’

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All of which, I suppose, takes us back to where we started: the silence. I have just written 2,500 words of noise to try and get at the matter of silence, and of course have not achieved it, because it is not achieved this way. Lent is a strange journey of deepening: I have learned this very slowly over the years. I am far from being any kind of ascetic, and my Lenten discipline regularly disappoints me, but even so, something seems to happen every year. This year, I have not wanted to say much for weeks. Even when I write, I write about silence. Something is calling me away. I am still not sure where to go, or how.

It took me a long time as a Christian to even begin to understand that much of the work, at least for beginners, is simply in shutting up. There is no point in worrying about whether you are silent or childlike or holy enough, or in trying to make yourself some kind of holy ascetic through force of will. Force of will doesn’t get you that far. You can run off to the forest or the desert if you like: some people are called to that life and some people are not. But we are all called to make a desert of our hearts. The Holy Spirit will alight there, we are told, when it finds a peace to welcome it.

However, we do it, so much of the work, I think now, is struggling to allow silence a place to grow. When we do that, much of our overcomplicated, worldly nonsense just falls away, even if only for a second. The cement cracks, our stories shatter, and we begin to see how to walk away from ourselves. In the silence, perhaps we discover how to be children again.

Father Symeon should have the last word, I think, because I have written too many already:

‘Spiritual work happens secretly in the heart. Externally, let everything else threaten us. Like the sea: The wind blows, waves rise. But deep down it’s all quiet, peaceful, serene.

This is how a man who trusts in God lives. There might be a wild rage out there, but deep down nothing hinders the soul from having a mystical communion with God, a mystical love for God. Quietly and mystically, in a special way that the heart perceives, the Lord is whispering: “Don’t be afraid. I am here. Keep walking this path. Keep loving me, keep believing in me, keep following me”.

It’s not enough to suffer myriad things in life. When, though, you believe in God and accept all these - whatever it is that happens to you - gladly, for the love of God, God will make a saint out of you.’⁸

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1. Fr Men’s Lenten homilies are collected in Awake To Life, published in 1996 by Oakwood Publications, California

2. 1 Kings 19:12

3. Quoted from Guidelines For Prayer by Matthew the Poor, St Macarius Press, 2021

4. Luke 18:15

5. Matthew 18:1 - 5

6. Matthew 6:26 - 34

7. Published by Divine Ascent Press, California, in 2010.

8. ‘Christians of Comfort.’ https://www.orthodoxpath.org/spiritual-life/christians-of-comfort/