The Music That The Angels Do

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” - C.S. Lewis

People it all falls apart and you're left holding your heart

Massaging it hard, but we can't get it to start

And they sing for us, but we don't want to hear it

They watch over us, and we hide our own spirit

Well they do it all for love even though we're all used

It's the music that the angels do - Listener (The music that the angels do)

Sometimes I fear that I myself have come to a place of hardness. It often feels like my heart is all used up. That’s been a constant internal narrative I’ve been battling. 

At times, when there is an absence of emotion, when there is nothing there and feel like my insides are going dark, I think I start to turn to anything that will stir me up.  

Maybe it’s that I’m mistaking emotional elevation for joy. Because it’s not as if there is a stillness and then a warmth inside like the fathers say. 

It’s just quiet and cold and it feels like I’m echoing the Jesus Prayer into a chasm of nothing. It feels like I’m in the abyss of my heart and screaming in the darkness and am unable to let the words escape that darkness. It can be difficult to confront it. But at that point, I feel as though I’m irredeemable. 

Perhaps it’s that I’m trying to massage stone into flesh, like I’m holding onto to the suffocating sterile box of a neat little religious life and inside of that nice little box lives nothing. 

I know for sure that it is a part of the journey. It is a part going up to the city of God with the cross on your back. Elder Sophrony said to peer in the abyss. But he also said to take a step back. But it does not mean to step back into the old way of life. It means to step back into rest. Even in rest, we must rest in God. Leisure must be God pleasing leisure where we not only experience God but pursue Him. 

There is also the temptation to go and look for some big cause. But the lover in The Song of Solomon said, “Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyard.” No sane person purposefully destroys a vineyard they have. But the little foxes burrow and creep and sneak in and out. These little foxes of annoyance, impatience, the prideful daydreaming of imagining yourself to be “better” than what you are when in reality it will always infinitely fall short of what you are in Christ already and what God would have you become. The little foxes are cute, they are playful, they aren’t the big sins. They are the tiny no big deal things. They are the gods of coarse jesting, and foul language, the belly, procrastination, laziness, grumbling, complaining, thinking I’m right or justified. They are the cultural sins that creep into every nation and slowly become the fabric of everyday life to the point that no one questions them. It is to the point where reading spiritual writing could lead us to think that the saints are extreme in their call for holiness. And just like the little foxes we think that they don’t matter. How could they affect us in a significant way? Quite easily. Grumbling and laziness can lead to decisions based on self-righteous. Ingratitude, crude talk and procrastination can slowly erode the moral compass until we become surprised when we fall into sins like bitterness, hatred, murder, alcoholism, porn addiction or worse. I’m seeing now that we must completely guard ourselves fully and keep free from all defilement. And we must truly see all defilement as filth. We must catch the little foxes.