The hardened heart

There is a state worse than falling: when the fall stops hurting. John Climacus calls it insensibility, the death of the soul before the death of the body. It is negligence that has become habit and lulled reason to sleep.

John gives a long and painfully accurate portrait of such a man. He talks about healing the wound, yet keeps scratching it. He prays against the passion, yet hurries to satisfy it. He praises silence in many words. He reads about the judgement and laughs. And John tells of people who wept on hearing about death, and before their tears had dried ran to the table.

He philosophises about death, and lives as if he will never die.

The most honest thing in this teaching is that John admits he is gripped by this passion himself and cannot describe it to the end. Today you recognise it by the gap between words and deeds. You know what you need to change, you talk about it, and nothing changes. The suffering of others, even of those close to you, does not reach you. You repent, then repeat, then repent again, and that rhythm has become normal to you.

The remedy begins with deeds, not words. Choose the one thing you most often say you ought to change, and take the first step today, without announcing it. Then look for the cause, because insensibility, John says, does not have the same root in everyone. In one it is satiety, in another tiredness and overwork, in another years without silence. Ask yourself when you were last alive inside, and what has changed since. Cut back on satiety, because it gives this passion strength. Go to the cemetery alone and sit by the grave of someone you loved, without hurry. And wake your feeling through deeds towards people: look at faces, not only tasks, sit with a child without hurry, visit someone who is ill. The heart wakes through encounter.

This rung also has a trap that concerns this very register. Reading, even reading these notes, can become a way of feeling good while changing nothing. The second trap is expecting the feeling to return at once. A stone is not broken with one blow: this passion grows firm with time, and with time it leaves.

The sign that you have climbed: something touches you again, another’s suffering, your own fault, a single word. And the gap between what you say and what you do keeps getting smaller.

The question remains: if the heart wakes through encounter, why do sleep and tiredness lull it so easily?

N. Ž.