Clear Stream

49. Do not befoul your intellect by clinging to thoughts filled with anger and sensual desire. Otherwise you will lose your capacity for pure prayer and fall victim to the demon of listlessness.

St. Maximus the Confessor Four Hundred Centuries on Love: #49

Picture a mountain stream: cold, clear, quickening, its waters flowing like hope from the springs high in the quieting peaks, a rivulet that is very much the mind shorn of all preconceptions, clear and directed, cutting through the undergrowth of spirituality with clear prayer and reflection.

But let us also visualize that brook, winding down the mountainside, into those valleys where the soils of human experience are rich with all the complexities of emotion. Now, this is the danger: when the waters are muddied by the sediments of anger and the silt of desire. And if the intellect adheres to these pollutants, then that crystal clear stream becomes muddy and the flow of water is disturbed, the reflection of the sky above is hidden.

Maximus the Confessor warns of the danger in allowing such thoughts to have traction. Anger and desire are potent forces which stir up the waters of the intellect, making them brackish and unwholesome. The clarity of prayer — that pure communion with the divine — relies upon the stream's untainted flow. Because to succumb to these base thoughts is to open the door to the demon of listlessness in our life of the spirit, a lethargy that suffocates our prayers and blunts our spiritual longing.

Listlessness, acedia, a creeping vine that chokes the vitality of a garden. It saps the energy from our devotion and renders our pursuit of the divine, lackluster and uninspired. It stands in the way of the seeker in the spiritual path, for with it comes a cloud of apathy that taints the intellect, and the once-vivid landscape becomes devoid of creativity and inspiration.

How, then, do we protect the stream of our intellect from such contamination? The answer lies in vigilance and the continual reorientation of our thoughts. In that active filtering of the mental waters through the sieve of discernment, catching the grains of anger and desire before they settle and spoil the purity of contemplation.

This is where one truly exercises free will, every day, in the effort of turning from the fleeting passions promising immediate satisfaction and leading to spiritual shallowness. We turn up the other road — the higher road, the road less traveled, toward clear waters and pure prayer.

And so, let us be guardians of the stream of the intellect, so that its waters stay pure, that it may boldly and unhindered flow towards the ocean of divine love. We thereby secure in the process not just our ability to pray purely, but also that we strengthen resistance to faint signs of torpor, so that our path to the spirit will always be preserved and our relation to God is animated endlessly.