Episode Details

Third Reflection Lenten Retreat 2026 When God Begins to Take Everything

On the Delusion of Belonging to God While Still Belonging to Oneself “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

Matthew 27:46

There comes a point in the spiritual life when the man can no longer recognize himself.

Until this point, he has struggled with visible things. With sins. With distractions. With passions that moved through his body and mind. He struggled to restrain them. He struggled to purify himself. He struggled to become faithful.

This struggle had structure. It had direction. It had meaning. He could see what he was fighting.
He could measure progress.
He could recognize failure and repentance.

He lived with the sense that he was moving toward God. Even when he failed, he knew where he stood.
Even when he fell, he knew he could rise.
His existence had continuity.

His identity had stability.
He was a man seeking God.
He knew himself as such.
Then something begins to happen that he cannot understand. God removes not sin, but support.
Not temptation, but stability.
Not rebellion, but ground.

1

Prayer continues, but something within it has disappeared. The words remain. The effort remains. The intention remains. But life has receded.
He speaks to God, but he does not experience being heard. He calls, but nothing answers.

He remembers when prayer gave him warmth, when the name of Christ carried sweetness, when he felt himself held in a presence greater than himself.

Now that presence cannot be found.
He does not know whether it has left or whether he has.

St. Isaac the Syrian writes that there is a stage in which God withdraws the perceptible operation of grace so that the soul may be taught that it does not possess Him.

This withdrawal is not punishment.
It is revelation.
Until this point, the man believed he depended on God. Now he sees that he depended on his experience of God. He depended on the stability that experience gave him. He depended on the sense that he knew where he stood. This sense has now been taken.
He no longer knows where he stands.
He no longer knows what he is.
He no longer knows how to locate himself before God.

Evagrios says that when grace withdraws, the soul is handed over to knowledge of its own powerlessness.

2

Not intellectual knowledge. Existential knowledge.

The man discovers that he cannot produce even the smallest movement toward God by his own strength.

He cannot restore what has been taken. He cannot recover the life he once knew. He cannot make himself alive again. This knowledge terrifies him.

Because until now, he has lived with the assumption that he existed. That he endured.
That he remained himself across time.
That his relationship with God was something he inhabited.

Now even this has dissolved.

He experiences groundlessness.

Not emotional instability.

Ontological groundlessness.

He cannot find the place within himself from which he once lived.

St. Macarius the Great says that until the soul passes through abandonment, it cannot be freed from the illusion that it possesses life.

This illusion is so subtle that even humility cannot destroy it. The man may believe he is nothing.
He may confess his weakness.
He may acknowledge his dependence.

And still exist as the center of his own life.

3

God removes this center.
Not suddenly.
But completely.
The man cannot stop this process. He cannot preserve himself.

He cannot secure himself.
Everything he relied on to know himself has been taken.
This produces the deepest temptation.
Not the temptation to sin.
The temptation to restore himself.
To rebuild identity.
To recover stability.
To become again the one he was.
Many do this unco