Lenten Retreat: The Dismantling of the Religious Self, Session Three

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 unconsciously.
They reconstruct their religious self.
They recover certainty.
They regain structure.
They resume existing as before.
And they lose something they do not understand.
They lose the possibility of union.
Because union requires the disappearance of the one who lives apart from God.

St. Paul writes with terrifying clarity, “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Colossians 3:3

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Hidden.
Not strengthened.
Not improved.
Hidden.
The man can no longer find himself.
Because he no longer exists where he once lived.
Christ entered this darkness fully.
“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
He entered the experience of abandonment.
Not because He had lost the Father.
But because He had surrendered every human ground.
He stood where man stands when nothing remains.
So that man could stand there and live.
St. Silouan says, “Keep thy mind in hell and despair not.”
Hell is the place where every support has been removed.
Where the self cannot preserve itself.
Where existence depends entirely on God.
The ego cannot survive here.
This is its death.
The man who remains here without turning back passes beyond himself. But he does not yet know this.
He knows only loss.

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Only absence.

Only the disappearance of the one he believed himself to be.

This is the threshold of resurrection.

But resurrection cannot yet be seen.

Only death can be seen.

And the man must remain.

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This is the most terrible mercy God gives to those He draws near.

Because as long as the man can still find himself, he still lives from himself.

As long as he can still locate stability within his own experience, he has not yet been born of God.

Christ said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” John 12:24

Remains alone.
Even if it is righteous.
Even if it is faithful.
Even if it believes itself to belong to God.
As long as it remains intact, it remains alone.

St. Sophrony writes that God allows the soul to descend into this darkness so that it may learn to exist from Him alone and not from any created support, including its own experience of grace.

This descent feels like death because it is death.
The death of psychological continuity.
The death of spiritual self recognition.
The death of the one who could say, I am the one who prays.

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Now prayer continues.

But the one who prayed cannot be found.

The Jesus Prayer may still be spoken.

The lips may still move.

The mind may still form the words.

But the center from which it once came has been shattered.

The man stands before God without himself.

This is why the psalmist cries, “I am forgotten like one dead, out of mind; I am like a broken vessel.” Psalm 30:12 LXX

Forgotten.

Broken.

Without place.

Without continuity.

Without self possession.

St. Isaac says that when the soul enters this stage, it feels itself suspended between existence and non existence.

It cannot return to what it was.
It cannot yet see what it will become. It cannot move forward.
It cannot move back.
It can only remain.
This remaining is crucifixion.
Christ did not descend from the Cross.

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He remained.
He did not preserve Himself.
He entrusted Himself.
“Father, into Your hands I commend My spirit.” Luke 23:46 This is the final act of abandonment.
Not abandonment by God.
Abandonment of oneself into God.

Archimandrite Zacharias writes that at this stage, man learns true obedience. Not obedience of action, but obedience of being. He no longer acts from himself. He no longer preserves himself. He exists in radical dependence.

This dependence feels like non existence. Because the ego cannot live this way. The ego requires ground.
Continuity.

Self possession.
Identity.
God removes all of it.
Not to destroy the person.
But to reveal the person.
Because the person does not exist in himself.
The person exists in God.
St. Paul writes, “For in Him we live and move and have our being.” Acts 17:28 Not alongside Him.
Not with assistance from Him.

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In Him.

When this is seen, the man understands that his previous life, even his spiritual life, was sustained by illusion.

He believed he lived.

He believed he endured.

He believed he remained.

Now he sees that he does not possess existence.

Existence is given.

Moment by moment.

Breath by breath.

“God withdraws His breath, and they perish and return to their dust.” Psalm 103:29 LXX

The man feels this.
Not as theology.
As reality.
He feels that if God does not sustain him, he will cease. Not morally.

Ontologically.

This is why fear arises.

Not fear of punishment.

Fear of non being.

But if the man remains, something begins to happen that he cannot yet perceive.

A new center begins to emerge.

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Not located within himself.

Located in God.

Christ begins to live where the ego once lived.

This is why St. Paul says, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Galatians 2:20

Not metaphor.

Ontological fact.

The old center has died.

A new center has been given.

St. Silouan writes that when man descends into this hell and remains with faith, the Lord Himself becomes his life.

Not as comfort.
As existence.
The man no longer lives toward God.
He lives from God.
But before this becomes clear, there is only darkness. Only abandonment.
Only the terrible silence of God.

St. Sophrony says that this silence is not absence, but the deepest form of presence. God is acting beyond perception, dismantling the final illusion that man possesses himself.

The man feels forsaken. But he is being carried. He feels abandoned.

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But he is being born.

This is the third dismantling.

Not the destruction of sin.

Not the destruction of righteousness.

The destruction of the illusion that one belongs to God while still belonging to oneself.

God takes everything.
Even the man’s experience of belonging to Him.
So that the man may finally belong to Him completely.
And the man must remain.
Without returning.
Without rebuilding.
Without preserving anything.
He must remain in the darkness where Christ Himself stood. “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
And wait for the life that only God can give.

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