Archimandrite Zacharias (Zacharou)
All the ordinances of the undefiled Church are offered to the world for the sole purpose of discovering the ‘deep heart’,[1]
the centre of man’s hypostasis. According to the Holy Scriptures, God
has fashioned every heart in a special way, and each heart is His goal,
a place wherein He desires to abide that He may manifest Himself.
Since the kingdom of God is within us,[2] the
heart is the battlefield of our salvation, and all ascetic effort is
aimed at cleansing it of all filthiness, and preserving it pure before
the Lord. ‘Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the
issues of life’, exhorts Solomon, the wise king of Israel.[3]
These paths of life pass through man’s heart, and therefore the
unquenchable desire of all who ceaselessly seek the Face of the living
God is that their heart, once deadened by sin, may be rekindled by His
grace.
The heart is the true ‘temple’ of man’s meeting with the Lord. Man’s heart ‘seeketh knowledge’[4] both
intellectual and divine, and knows no rest until the Lord of glory
comes and abides therein. On His part God, Who is ‘a jealous God’,[5] will
not settle for a mere portion of the heart. In the Old Testament we
hear His voice crying out, ‘My son, give Me thy heart’;[6] and
in the New Testament He commands: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and
with all thy strength.’[7] He is
the one Who has fashioned the heart of every man in a unique and
unrepeatable way, though no heart can contain Him fully because ‘God is
greater than our heart’.[8] Nevertheless,
when man succeeds in turning his whole heart to God, then God Himself
begets it by the incorruptible seed of His word, seals it with His
wondrous Name and makes it shine with His perpetual and charismatic
presence. He makes it a temple of His Divinity, a temple not made by
hands, able to reflect His ‘shape’ and to hearken unto His ‘voice’ and
‘bear’ His Name.[9] In a word, man then fulfils the purpose of his life, the reason for his coming into the transient existence of this world.
The great tragedy of our time lies in
the fact that we live, speak, think, and even pray to God, outside our
heart, outside our Father’s house. And truly our Father’s house is our
heart, the place where ‘the spirit of glory and of God’[10] would find repose, that Christ may ‘be formed in us’.[11]
Indeed, only then can we be made whole, and become hypostases in the
image of the true and perfect Hypostasis, the Son and Word of God, Who
created us and redeemed us by the precious Blood of His ineffable
sacrifice.
Yet, as long as we are held captive by
our passions, which distract our mind from our heart and lure it into
the ever-changing and vain world of natural and created things, thus
depriving us of all spiritual strength, we will not know the new birth
from on High that makes us children of God and gods by grace. In fact,
in one way or another, we are all ‘prodigal sons’ of our Father in
heaven, because, as the Scriptures testify, ‘All have sinned, and come
short of the glory of God.’[12] Sin has separated our mind from the life-giving contemplation of God and led it into a ‘far country’.[13]
In this ‘far country’ we have been deprived of the honour of our
Father’s embrace and, in feeding swine, we have been made subject to
demons. We gave ourselves over to dishonourable passions and the
dreadful famine of sin, which then established itself by force, becoming
the law of our members. But now we must come out of this godless hell
and return to our Father’s house, so as to uproot the law of sin that is
within us and allow the law of Christ’s commandments to dwell in our
heart. For the only path leading out of the torments of hell to the
everlasting joy of the Kingdom is that of the divine commandments: with
our whole being we are to love God and our neighbour with a heart that
is free of all sin.
The return journey from this remote and
inhospitable land is not an easy one, and there is no hunger more
fearful than that of a heart laid waste by sin. Those in whom the heart
is full of the consolation of incorruptible grace can endure all
external deprivations and afflictions, transforming them into a feast
of spiritual joy; but the famine in a hardened heart lacking divine
consolation is a comfortless torment. There is no greater misfortune
than that of an insensible and petrified heart that is unable to
distinguish between the luminous Way of God’s Providence and the gloomy
confusion of the ways of this world. On the other hand, throughout
history there have been men whose hearts were filled with grace. These
chosen vessels were enlightened by the spirit of prophecy, and were
therefore able to distinguish between Divine Light and the darkness of
this world.
No matter how daunting and difficult the
struggle of purifying the heart may be, nothing should deter us from
this undertaking. We have on our side the ineffable goodness of a God
Who has made man’s heart His personal concern and goal. In the Book of
Job, we read the following astonishing words: ‘What is man, that thou
shouldest magnify him? And that thou shouldest set thine heart upon
him? And that thou shouldest visit him every morning, and try him every
moment…Why hast thou set me as a mark against thee, so that I am a
burden to myself?’[14] We sense
God, Who is incomprehensible, pursuing man’s heart: ‘Behold, I stand at
the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I
will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.’[15] He
knocks at the door of our heart, but He also encourages us to knock at
the door of His mercy: ‘Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’[16]
When the two doors that are God’s goodness and man’s heart open, then
the greatest miracle of our existence occurs: man’s heart is united with
the Spirit of the Lord, God feasting with the sons of men.
We deprive ourselves of the feast of
God’s consolation not only when we hand ourselves over to the corruption
of sin, feeding swine in a far country, but also when we contend in a
negligent way. ‘Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord
deceitfully,’ warns the Prophet Jeremiah.[17] In
the feeding of swine, it is the devil, our enemy, who gives us work
which is accursed. But if we do the Lord’s work half-heartedly, we put
ourselves under a curse, though we may be dwelling in the house of the
Lord. For God will not tolerate division in man’s heart; He is pleased
only when man speaks to Him with all his heart and does His work
joyfully: ‘God loveth a cheerful giver,’ says the Apostle.[18] He
wants our whole heart to be turned and devoted to Him, and He then
fills it with the bounties of His goodness and the gifts of His
compassion. He ‘sows bountifully’[19] but He expects the same from us.
From the few thoughts we have mentioned,
we now begin to see how precious it is to stand before God with our
whole heart as we pour it out before Him. We also begin to understand
how vital is the task of discovering the heart, because this allows us
to talk to God and our Father from the heart and to be heard by Him, and
to give Him the right to perfect the work of our renewal and
restoration to the original honour we enjoyed as His sons.
As long as man is under the dominion of
sin and death, being given over to the power of evil, he becomes
increasingly selfish. In his pride and despair, and being separated
from God Who is good, he struggles to survive, but the only thing he
gains is a heavier curse upon his head and even greater desolation. But
however much he may be corrupted by the famine of sin, the primal gift
of his having been created in God’s ‘image and likeness’ remains
irrevocable and indelible. Thus, he always carries within him the
possibility of a rising out of the kingdom of darkness and into to the
kingdom of light and life. This occurs when he ‘comes to himself’ and in
pain of soul confesses, ‘I perish with hunger.’[20]
When fallen man ‘comes to himself’ and
turns to God, ‘it is time for the Lord to work’, as we say at the
beginning of the Divine Liturgy; in pain, man then enters his own heart,
which is the greatest honour reserved by God for wretched man. God
knows that He can now seriously converse with him, and is attentive to
him, for when man enters his heart he speaks to God with knowledge of
his true state, for which he now feels responsible. Indeed, man’s whole
struggle is waged in order to convince God that he is His child, His
very own, and when he has convinced Him, then he will hear in his heart
those great words of the Gospel, ‘All that I have is thine.’[21]
And the moment he convinces God that he is His, God makes the
waterfalls of His compassion to flow, and God’s life becomes his life.
This is the good pleasure of God’s original design in that it is for
this that He created man. God then says to the one who has succeeded in
persuading Him that he is His, ‘All My life, O man, is thy life.’ Then
the Lord, Who is God by nature, grants man His own life, and man becomes
a god by grace.
In the Gospel of St Luke we are told
that the prodigal son ‘came to himself’ and said, ‘I will arise and go
to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against
heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.’[22] This
is a wondrous moment, a momentous event in the spiritual world.
Suffering, affliction, and the menacing famine of the ‘far country’
compel man to look within himself. But a single movement of divine grace
is enough to convert the energy of his misfortune into great boldness,
and he is enabled to see his heart and all the deadness from which he
is suffering. Now, with prophetic knowledge, he boldly confesses that
‘his days are consumed in vanity’.[23] In
pain of soul, he discovers that his whole life until then consists of a
series of failures and betrayals of God’s commandments, and that he has
done no good deed upon earth which can withstand the unbearable gaze of
the Eternal Judge. He sees his plight and, like the much-afflicted Job,
cries out, ‘Hades is my house.’[24]
With such a lamentation of despair and,
thirsting only for God’s blessed eternity, man can then turn his whole
being towards the living Lord. He can cry from the depth of his heart to
Him Who ‘has power of life and death: who leads to the gates of hell,
and brings up again’.[25] This is the turning point in our life, for God the Saviour then begins His work of refashioning man.
When man falls into sin his mind moves
in an outward direction and loses itself in created things, but when,
conscious of his perdition, he comes to himself seeking salvation, he
then moves inward as he searches for the way back to the heart. Finally,
when all his being is gathered in the unity of his mind and heart,
there is a third kind of movement in which he turns his whole being over
to God the Father. Man’s spirit must pass through this threefold
circular motion in order to reach perfection.
During the first stage, man lives and
acts outside his heart and entertains proud thoughts and considers vain
things. In fact, he is in a state of delusion. His heart is darkened
and void of understanding. In his fallen condition, he prefers to
worship and serve ‘the creature more than the Creator’.[26] Because he lives without his heart, he has no discernment and is ‘ignorant of [Satan’s] devices’.[27] As the Old Testament wisely observes: ‘The fool hath no heart to get wisdom’,[28] and because his heart is not the basis of his existence, man remains inexperienced and unfruitful, ‘beating the air’.[29] He is unable to walk steadily in the way of the Lord and is characterised by instability and double-mindedness.
In the second stage, man ‘comes to
himself’, and he begins to have humble thoughts that attract grace and
make his heart sensitive. Humble thoughts also enlighten his mind; they
are born within himself, and they help him in discerning and accepting
only those things that strengthen the heart, so that it stays
unshakeable in its resolution to be pleasing to God both in life and in
death. During the first stage, man surrenders to a vicious circle of
destructive thoughts, whilst in the second, inspired by Christ’s word,
he is led along a chain of thoughts, each deeper than the last: from
faith he is led to more perfect faith, from hope to firmer hope, from
grace to greater grace and from love of God to an ever greater measure
of love. ‘We know’, as the Apostle Paul says, ‘that all things work
together for good to them that love God.’[30]
Indeed, this entry ‘into oneself’ and the discovery of the heart are
the work of divine grace. And when man heeds God’s call and co-operates
with the grace that is bestowed on him, this grace summons and
strengthens all his being.
When the grace of mindfulness of death
becomes active, man not only sees that all his days have been consumed
in vanity, that everything until now has been a failure, and that he has
betrayed God all his life, but he realises that death threatens to blot
out all that his conscience has hitherto embraced, even God. He is
now convinced that his spirit has need of eternity and that no created
thing, neither angel nor man, can help him. This provokes him to seek
freedom from every created thing and every passionate attachment. And if
he then believes in Christ’s word and turns to Him, then it is easy for
him to find his heart because he is becoming a free being. His faith
is salutary, for he now acknowledges that Christ is the ‘rewarder of
them that diligently seek him’,[31] that
is, he believes that Christ is the eternal and almighty Lord Who has
come to save the world and will come again to judge the whole world with
justice. He has entrusted himself to ‘the law of faith’,[32] and begins to believe in hope against hope,[33]
pinning everything on the mercy of God the Saviour. Such true faith can
be seen in the Canaanite woman, who received the Lord’s instruction as a
dog receives food from its master, and she followed Him freely and
steadfastly. As far as she was concerned, God remained righteous and
forever blessed whether He were to rebuke her or praise her. Faith like
this receives the approval of adoption because it grows out of love and
humility, ever attracting divine grace which opens and quickens the
heart.
When man believes and his spirit finds true contact with the Spirit of ‘Jesus Christ who was raised from the dead’[34] and
Who lives and reigns forever, he is enlightened so that he can see his
spiritual poverty and desolation. He also perceives that he is still far
from eternal life, and this gives birth to great fear in him because he
is now aware that God is absent from his life. Godly fear such as this
strengthens man’s heart to resist sin and begets a firm resolve to
prefer heavenly things to earthly things. His life begins to prove the
truth of the words of Scripture: ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom.’[35] As man’s heart
draws to itself the grace of God, this gift of fear humbles him, and
prevents him from becoming overbold; that he ‘not think of himself more
highly than he ought to think’,[36] and that he keep himself prudently within the limits of created being.
Another infallible means by which the
believer finds his heart is in accepting shame for his sins in the
sacrament of confession. Christ saved us by enduring the Cross of shame
for our sakes. Similarly, when the believer comes out of the camp of
this world,[37] he disregards its
good opinion and judgment, taking upon himself the shame of his sins,
and thereby acquiring a humble heart. The Lord receives his sense of
shame for his sins as a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and imparts to him
the grace of His great Sacrifice on the Cross. This grace so purifies
and renews his heart that he can then stand before God in a manner that
is pleasing to Him.
There are many ideas, theories as well
as practices that contribute to the heart’s awakening, its building up,
its preservation and enlightenment, and finally to its Christ-like
enlarging, and we shall develop some of these in the days to come. For
the time being, I would just like to mention two more – prayer and
repentance.
In the Jesus Prayer, the invocation of
the Lord’s Name draws the believer into the living presence of the
Personal God, Whose energy is imparted to the heart, transforming the
whole man. When prayer is humble and accompanied by the practice of
watchfulness, the mind is concentrated in the heart that is the
dwelling-place of our beloved God, and He grants us a marvellous sense
of His closeness that is beyond words.
As for repentance, this all-embracing
practice builds and keeps the heart more than any other undertaking.
Repentance has a wondrous and holy purpose. The person who repents bears
witness to the living God of our Fathers as a God Who is righteous and
true in all His desires, all His ways and judgments. But repentance also
acknowledges the fact that man is a liar,[38] deluded
by sin, and therefore deprived of the honour and glory which God gave
him in the beginning. And this is where the person who would repent must
begin: he confesses his sinfulness, taking his sin upon himself in
humility and self-condemnation. There is no trace of audacity in his
conversion, and he becomes true and attracts the Spirit of Truth, Who
cleanses him from sin and justifies him.[39] As St Silouan used to say, the Holy Spirit bears witness in his heart to his salvation.[40] But
the Lord too is justified, for He is true Who confirms the words of His
Prophet: ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a
contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.’[41] For
when man comes to himself and freely says from his heart, ‘Father, I
have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be
called thy son’, the voice of heavenly goodness then sounds in his
soul: ‘All that I have is thine.’[42]
To begin with, man repents of his sins.
But as the grace of repentance increases, his estrangement from eternal
life is healed and the wisdom of God’s pre-eternal design with regard to
man opens up before him. The image[43] of
his Archetype, Christ, is gradually formed in his heart as he perceives
ever more clearly his calling to become like Him, ‘after the image of
him that created him’[44] and he no
longer compares himself with mortals, but with the eternal God. This
vision leads him to the fulness of repentance, that is, repentance on
the ontological level, which, according to Fr Sophrony, has no end upon
earth.
In the early stages of repentance, the
believer carries the small cross that God’s Providence, in His
discernment and love for mankind, has foreseen in the life of each one
of us. Our personal cross is shaped according to our specific need to
be liberated from every form of passionate attachment, and unless we
carry it we will never be able to love God our Creator and Benefactor
with a free heart and run His course faithfully and steadily. In other
words, we take up our cross in response to the commandment to repent,
and it becomes the key to our entry into the great and eternal
inheritance, which Christ gained for us through His Cross and
Resurrection.
But there are no limits to man’s
repentance. The highest form of repentance for which God bestows an
exceptional measure of grace is when man who offers up a cry of
repentance for the whole human race and, like another Adam, perceives
the cosmic consequences of his own fallen state. We see examples of this
kind of repentance in the three Holy Children in Babylon, in the great
Apostle Paul, in the humble intercession of all the Saints, and last but
not least, in St Silouan’s prayer for the whole world: ‘I pray Thee O
merciful Lord for all the peoples of the earth, that they may come to
know Thee by Thy Holy Spirit.’[45] The depth of this deceptively simple prayer can be discerned in Adam’s Lament, his personal portrait of universal repentance.
How, then, does repentance become
universal in its content? If we prepare the soil of our heart with the
plough of repentance and continually irrigate it with the living water
of grace, a time will come when ‘the day will dawn, and the day star
will arise in our hearts’.[46] At
some point, the energy of the Spirit of Truth, which will have
accumulated in the heart, will open and enlarge the heart infinitely,
and it will embrace heaven and earth, and all that exists. On this day,
man will enter into Truth and thus be regenerated as true man. Then,
according to the prophetic words of the Psalmist, ‘True man goeth forth
unto his true work and labour until the evening of his life.’[47] He will then know how to ‘perfect holiness in the fear of God’,[48] to
think upon ‘whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just,
whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
things are of good report’,[49] undertaking only such things as will contribute to his spiritual perfecting. The peace of Christ, the Prince of Peace[50] will
reign in his heart, and his every word will echo the treasure of
perfection which he contains within himself. He will offer whatsoever
overflows from the good treasure of his heart out of love for his
fellows, and his enlarged heart[51]
will not exclude anyone. His spirit will scale eternal heights and
survey the depths of the judgments of God’s compassion. He will offer up
his prayer, bringing every soul before the Lord, and praying that God
may fill the heart of each with the incorruptible consolation of His
Spirit.
When the heart is thus given fully to
the Lord Jesus, He overshadows it with His messianic power, for He
possesses the marvellous key of David, which, with a single right turn,
‘brings into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ’.[52] The
humility of his thoughts generates intense spiritual energy within him,
fuelling the soul’s inspiration and endurance in following the good
Lord ‘whithersoever he goeth’,[53] even
to hell. Then again, a single left turn of this key opens the way for
all the thoughts of the enemy to return to man’s bosom. Should this
happen, he will acquire spiritual watchfulness, which will be carried
out with angelic precision, making the believer a sharer in the
supra-cosmic victory of our God and Saviour. From this point on, his
struggle is essentially positive in character, and only rarely negative.
The ascetic now labours with ever greater longing ‘to be clothed upon
with our house which is in heaven…that mortality might be swallowed up
by life’,[54] and he witnesses the powerful and infinite ‘increase of God’[55] in himself.
The heart is now purified by the grace
of God, and the intellect can establish itself there with ease, through
the invocation of the Name of Christ. Whereupon the heart, quite
naturally, begins to cry unceasingly with ‘groanings which cannot be
uttered’.[56] From this time forth, the Lord is ever present, dwelling in our heart, and being ‘taught of God’,[57] we
learn to discern which thoughts are in harmony with His presence and
which ones hinder His coming and abiding in us. In other words, we are
initiated into the prophetic life. The heart is instructed to indite
good matters,[58] to understand the
language of God and with holy determination to cry ceaselessly, ‘My
heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready: I will sing and give praise’
to my Redeemer.[59] We are taught
how to become signs of the Spirit, witnessing to the truth of Him Who
has come to save us and Who will come again to judge the world with
justice and goodness. With all our strength, and in all our endeavours,
we try to meet the expectations of our Lord, knowing that ‘the Lord
loves holy hearts, and all blameless persons are acceptable with him’.[60]
I have not said much, but I hope it is
clear that man’s principal work, which alone gives worth to his life, is
the effort of discovering and purifying his ‘deep heart’, that it may
be blessed with the indescribable contemplation of our God, Who is Holy.
Source: Archimandrite Zacharias
(Zacharou), The hidden man of the heart, edition Stavropegic Monastery
of St John the Baptist, Essex 2007, pp. 11-26.
NOTES
1. Cf. Ps. 64:6.
2. Cf. Luke 17:21.
3. Prov. 4:23.
4. Prov. 15:14.
5. Exod. 34:14.
6. Prov. 23:26.
7. Matt. 12:30.
8. 1 John 3:20.
9. Cf. John 5:37; Acts 9:15.
10. 1 Pet. 4:14.
11. Gal. 4:19.
12. Rom. 3:23.
13. Luke 9:15.
14. Job 7:17-18, 20.
15. Rev. 3:20.
16. Luke 11:9-10.
17. Jer. 48:10.
18. 2 Cor. 9:7.
19. Cf. 2 Cor. 9:6.
20. Luke 15:17.
21. Luke 15:31.
22. Luke 15:18-19.
23. Cf. Ps. 78:33.
24. Cf. Job 17:13.
25. Wisdom of Solomon 16:13.
26. Rom. 1:25.
27. 2 Cor. 2:11.
28. Cf. Prov. 17:16.
29. Cf. 1 Cor. 9:26.
30. Rom. 8:28.
31. Heb. 11:6.
32. Rom. 3:27.
33. Cf. Rom. 4:18.
34. 2 Tim. 2:8
35. Prov. 1:7 LXX.
36. Rom. 12:3.
37. Cf. Heb. 13:11-12.
38. Cf. Rom. 3:4.
39. Cf. 1 John 1:8-10.
40. Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov), Saint
Silouan the Athonite, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Tolleshunt Knights,
Essex: Patriarchal Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, 1991),
p. 304.
41. Ps. 51:17.
42. Luke 15:18-19, 31.
43. Cf. John 5:37.
44. Col. 3:10.
45. Cf. Saint Silouan, p. 274.
46. Cf. 2 Pet. 1:19.
47. Cf. Ps. 104:23.
48. 2 Cor. 7:1.
49. Phil. 4:8.
50. Isa. 9:6.
51. 2 Cor. 6:13.
52. 2 Cor. 10:5.
53. Rev. 14:4.
54. 2 Cor. 5:2-4.
55. Col. 2:19.
56. Rom. 8:26.
57. Cf. John 6:45.
58. Cf. Ps. 45:1.
59. Ps. 56:7 LXX.
60. Prov. 22:11 LXX.
