The Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian - Homily XX

There are passages in St. Isaac that can sound almost impossible to modern ears. His words on vigil are among them.

“Do not imagine,” he tells us, “that among all the works of monastics there is any practice greater than night vigil.”

We hear such words and immediately think of sleep deprivation, bodily exhaustion, long hours of psalmody, standing in darkness while the rest of the world sleeps. We wonder whether such a practice belongs to another age, another kind of human being, perhaps even another understanding of the spiritual life.

But this is precisely where we can misunderstand Isaac.

Vigil becomes incomprehensible when it is separated from desire.

If we begin with asceticism, vigil appears severe. If we begin with love, it begins to make sense.

The lover understands the night.

There are moments when we do not want an evening to end because we are with someone we love. There are conversations in which we cease looking at the clock. A mother remains awake beside a sick child without calculating the sacrifice. Someone awaiting the return of the beloved listens for every sound in the night.

Love changes our experience of time.

And so it is with the saints.

They did not remain awake because they despised sleep. They remained awake because they had discovered Someone for whom it was worth losing sleep.

This is the secret of vigil.

“That I May Be With You”

The Fathers understood the spiritual life far less as the fulfillment of religious obligations than as the awakening of desire. Beneath fasting, silence, solitude, tears, prostrations, psalmody, and vigil lies a single movement of the heart:

I want God.

Not merely His gifts.

Not consolation.

Not religious experiences.

Not even virtue considered as a possession.

God Himself.

This is why St. Isaac describes the mind of the one who keeps vigil as becoming light and buoyant, taking flight “as it were on wings.” The ascetic is not merely staying awake. Something within him is being released.

During the day the mind is scattered among a thousand things. We speak. We answer. We plan. We remember. We anticipate. We defend ourselves. We attend to necessities. Even when these things are good, the heart becomes divided among them.

Then comes the night.

The voices diminish.

The demands cease.

The world grows quiet.

And the soul discovers again the One whom it has been seeking beneath everything else.

This is why vigil was so precious to the Desert Fathers and remains so in the teaching of the great modern elders. It creates a space in which the heart can become undivided.

The night says:

There is nowhere else I need to go.

There is nothing I need to accomplish.

There is no one before whom I need to justify myself.

There is only God.

And I am here.

The Recovery of Wonder

Yet there is something even deeper in Isaac’s teaching.

Vigil is not merely about attention.

It is about wonder.

Isaac tells us that the one who perseveres in vigil begins to “gaze upon” heavenly realities. His language is deliberately extravagant: the soul comes to possess “the eyes of Cherubim.”

What does this mean?

It means that purification changes how we see.

The tragedy of fallen existence is not simply that we commit sins. It is that we gradually cease to be astonished by God.

We become accustomed to everything.

Accustomed to the Gospel.

Accustomed to the Eucharist.

Accustomed to the name of Jesus.

Accustomed to the Cross.

Accustomed even to the astonishing claim that the Creator of heaven and earth desires communion with us.

And when wonder disappears, desire soon weakens with it.

The Fathers knew that the heart must be awakened again.

This is one reason vigil has such power. In the silence of the night, familiar words can suddenly become new.

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God…”

We may have spoken those words ten thousand times.

Yet in the stillness something can happen.

Jesus.

The Name becomes luminous.

God is here.

God sees me.

God desires me.

God has called me into existence that I might share His life.

And suddenly prayer is no longer something we are performing.

It is encounter.

Wonder gives birth to desire, and desire gives birth to greater attention.

Then the soul begins to understand why the saints stayed awake.

The Vigil of the Lover

This is why we must be careful not to turn Isaac’s teaching into another spiritual program.

Stay awake longer.

Say more psalms.

Sleep less.

Accumulate hours.

Isaac himself warns against precisely this distortion. A person may endure “prolonged psalmody,” weariness of the tongue, and “night-long standing,” and yet receive little fruit because the mind is elsewhere.

The body is standing before God while the heart is wandering through the world.

Isaac asks, with characteristic directness: Why sow so much seed if we continually prevent it from bearing fruit?

Vigil without attention becomes habit.

Vigil without desire becomes endurance.

Vigil without love becomes religious achievement.

And religious achievement can quietly feed the very ego that asceticism is meant to dismantle.

The true vigil begins somewhere deeper.

Stay with Me.

This is the invitation hidden within the night.

Christ in Gethsemane asked His disciples, “Could you not watch with me one hour?”

Perhaps every vigil is, in some mysterious way, our answer to that question.

Yes, Lord.

I will stay.

Not because I am strong.

Not because I am an ascetic.

Not because I want to imagine myself among the saints.

I stay because You are here.

Why Vigil Requires the Day

This also explains something that Isaac emphasizes strongly and that can easily be overlooked.

The vigil cannot be separated from the way we live during the day.

If we spend the day deliberately filling the mind with noise, agitation, curiosity, argument, distraction, and endless encounters, we should not be surprised if those same things accompany us into prayer at night.

Isaac therefore insists that the monk who desires the fruit of vigil must guard himself from unnecessary disturbance during the day.

This is not contempt for the world.

It is custody of the heart.

The Fathers understood something about human consciousness that our age desperately needs to rediscover: what we give ourselves to leaves traces within us.

Everything enters the heart.

Images.

Conversations.

Arguments.

News.

Resentments.

Fantasies.

Fears.

The opinions of others.

The desire to be seen.

The need to respond.

The mind carries these things into silence.

Thus vigil actually begins long before nightfall.

It begins with how we guard the heart throughout the day.

The School of Freedom

This is one reason the disappearance of vigil from much contemporary Christian life is significant.

We have not merely lost an ascetical practice.

We have lost one of the great schools of desire, attention, and freedom.

The modern world teaches us to flee silence. It places a device in our hand capable of filling every empty moment. It trains the eyes to seek novelty and the mind to expect constant stimulation.

The Fathers move in precisely the opposite direction.

Be still.

Remain.

Watch.

Wait.

Listen.

Do not flee the emptiness.

Because eventually you may discover that it was never empty.

Someone was waiting for you there.

The purpose of vigil is not to prove that we can conquer the body. It is to become free enough to recognize the presence of the Beloved.

“I Sleep, but My Heart Is Awake”

The goal, then, is ultimately something greater than remaining physically awake.

The goal is wakefulness of heart.

“I sleep, but my heart is awake,” says the Bride in the Song of Songs.

There is the mystery.

The deepest vigil eventually becomes a state of the soul.

A person begins to live before God.

The Jesus Prayer continues beneath thought.

The remembrance of God becomes increasingly continuous.

The heart waits for Him.

Looks toward Him.

Listens for Him.

Desires Him.

This is the angelic quality Isaac sees in vigil. The angels do not merely “stay awake.” They exist in ceaseless attention to God.

Their life is beholding.

And Isaac dares to say that through vigil the human person begins to participate in this same movement.

The eyes of the heart open.

Wonder returns.

Desire intensifies.

Prayer deepens.

The mind grows light.

And gradually the soul discovers that the ascetical life is not fundamentally a life of deprivation.

It is a life of fascination.

The Night Is Not Empty

Perhaps this is what we most need to recover from Isaac.

We will never understand the asceticism of the Fathers if we begin with what they gave up.

We must begin with what they saw.

They saw a Beauty before which the beauties of the world grew pale.

They tasted a sweetness that made lesser consolations seem small.

They discovered a Love so immense that solitude became communion, silence became fullness, fasting became hunger for God, and vigil became the refusal to leave the presence of the Beloved.

This is why the teaching on vigil belongs so naturally beside the language of desire and wonder.

The ascetic does not remain awake merely because a rule commands it.

He has glimpsed something.

And because he has glimpsed it, he wants to see more.

Wonder awakens desire.

Desire gathers the scattered heart.

The gathered heart becomes attentive.

Attention becomes prayer.

And prayer becomes communion.

Then something remarkable happens.

What once appeared burdensome becomes precious.

The night that once seemed long becomes too short.

Silence that once frightened us becomes the place we long to enter.

And the prayer that once seemed an obligation becomes something from which we are reluctant to depart.

The saints kept vigil because they discovered that the night was not empty.

The Beloved was there.

And once the heart knows this, the deepest question is no longer:

Why would anyone remain awake to pray?

It becomes:

How could love not want to remain?

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Text of chat during the group:

00:18:08 Bob Čihák, AZ: P 222, Homily 20

00:23:28 David Swiderski: The last time we discussed this and sleeping 8 hours straight and for most of time people at least in Europe slept "2" times I went back to my Grandfather's diary and it appears the wood stoves in Northern Wisconsin only lasted 4hrs and you would need to get up and feed the fire so they naturally did vigils and took advantage of the break in sleep. In Spain and Latina America they have a nap in some areas due to the heat (2 hour lunch) and are up till 1 or 2 am. It seems modern western society is a new adaptation of what was a practice for hundreds of years.

00:25:10 Ryan Ngeve: Father what is one to do if these practices and deprivations make us more agitated/irritated and downcast, especially towards  others, as they tend to do?

00:39:01 Gwen’s iPhone: my cat does!

00:39:24 James Hickman: Is it safe to call vigils a means to the end, which is nearness to the Lord, such that a super practical means to find closeness with the Lord is this watching for him when there are fewer distractions (not that we are safe from distractions in the night, but that the many combating us in the day are perhaps different in kind or number than those distractions of the night)?

00:42:15 Rod Castillo: I pray my daily rosary at 2 am.  It’s the only time the house is quiet enough to allow me to devote myself completely to it.

00:43:46 James Hickman: Reacted to "I pray my daily rosary at 2 am.  It’s the only time the house is quiet enough to allow me to devote myself completely to it." with 🫡

00:48:52 David Swiderski: Just one other thing I am embarrassed about. A protestant friend and I were discussing the real presence in the tabernacle and adoration and he bluntly told me if you really believed that why don't you stop at any church during the day just to say hello and ask for forgiveness. I really felt a lot of shame he is right. This was really common when I lived in Mexico people would just stop after lunch, on the way home for traffic to die down and do a short prayer along the way. Made me really think and have been trying to do this more when possible.  My mind makes it out to be such a huge disruption but I have been going to stores closer to where they have adoration and always feel better after just 5 minutes which I waste all the time in traffic or other things and still struggle to do this more. It seemed easier in Mexico where all my friends and even some clients would just drop in but there 95% of churches are catholic so you don't need to look far.

00:49:14 Myles Davidson: Reacted to "I pray my daily rosa..." with ❤️

00:52:49 Tracey Fredman: For those who say we shouldn't read the desert fathers might not be aware that the Rule of St. Benedict mentions them: "As for those who are hurrying toward the perfection of conversation, there are the teachings of the fathers whose observance may lead a person to the heights of perfection.  For what page or what word of divine authority in the Old or New Testament is not the most perfect standard of human life?  Or what book of the holy, catholic fathers does not resound with this, so that we may, by this straight path, reach our Creator? 5 Are there not the Conferences of the Fathers and their Institutes and Lives as well as the Rule of our Holy Father Basil?"

00:53:56 Tracey Fredman: Benedictine Oblates study the rule, even today.

00:56:07 James Hickman: Father, your chapter for priest pastors in The Monastic Heart really made me think so many American pastors need to take a week off and read that one chapter a few times.

00:56:25 James Hickman: The chapter after The Domestic Church

00:57:18 James Hickman: Reacted to "Benedictine Oblates study the rule, even today." with 💯

00:59:16 Maureen Cunningham: I Knew a man he was 85 he would awake art 3:00 am for years he had so much joy and he always said  why would"t you get up. It is all  joy

01:08:11 Janine: I feel like this was a retreat!

01:08:53 Eleana Urrego: Thank you

01:08:53 David Swiderski: I have been practicing psalmody on a holy hour on Friday and have looped through the sections (orthodox) a few times. It seems when I love others or make sacrifices it is like I see something else I never saw before. While some are repetitious a lot depends what I did during the week.

01:10:04 David Swiderski: My Mom used to call me David or Beloved interchangeably and since the psalms are from David well it really hits me

01:11:03 Janine: Yes! It’s beautiful

01:11:11 Janine: Lent

01:11:18 Melanie: It’s been my experience that anxiety about lack of sleep is much more tiring than actual lack of sleep. This is relevant in my work as a lactation consultant… helping moms to see that waking at night to feed their babies will not make them perish of exhaustion. Similar with vigils. <3

01:15:25 Rebecca Thérèse: Thank you☺️

01:15:29 Maureen Cunningham: Thank you sure please send it PDf