The Dangerous Calm of an Uncontested Soul

Have you ever solved a problem only to feel strangely unsettled by the solution?

Maybe you finally landed the job that was supposed to end all your stress, only to discover that the absence of the daily grind left you feeling aimless. Or perhaps you resolved a long-standing conflict with a friend or family member, and in the quiet that followed, you realized you didn’t quite know who you were without that tension shaping your days.

We imagine that if we could just remove the hard thing, the struggle, the friction, we would finally be at peace. And then the hard thing lifts, and we find that peace feels uncomfortably like emptiness.

This is the strange territory explored by Abba John the Dwarf, one of the most revered 'Desert Fathers' of the early church. Despite his reputation for holiness, John struggled with the same restlessness we do, once praying a prayer that most of us would consider perfectly reasonable:

"God, take my passions away so I can be free from care." (Sayings of the Desert Fathers: Alphabetical Collection, pp. 87-88)

Who among us hasn’t prayed some version of this? Take away my anxiety. Remove this temptation. Cure me from lust, pride, or envy: just take it all away so I don't have to fight these sins anymore! Fix my addiction and do it now! Deliver me from this struggle! Let me finally rest!

And when Abba John prayed this prayer, God, in His mysterious generosity, granted the request.

John got exactly what he asked for. The passions went silent. The inner warfare ceased.

He was, by his own testimony, “in peace, without an enemy.”

So he went to tell an elder, perhaps expecting congratulations. What he received instead was a correction that has echoed across sixteen centuries of Christian wisdom:

“Go, beseech God to stir up warfare so that you may regain the affliction and humility that you used to have, for it is by warfare that the soul makes progress.”

The old man told him to ask for the struggle back.

Let that sink in for a moment. The elder didn’t say, “How wonderful that you’ve arrived at tranquility.” He didn’t say, “You’ve reached the summit; stay there.” He said, essentially, You’ve lost something essential. Go get it back. And what John had lost, according to the elder, was not suffering for its own sake but the humility and spiritual progress that only come through engagement with difficulty.

 

The Dangerous Calm

There is a kind of peace that is not peace at all but numbness. There is a tranquility that signals not spiritual maturity but spiritual disengagement.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers, those radical fourth- and fifth-century Christians who fled to the Egyptian wilderness to wage war against everything in themselves that resisted God, understood this with a clarity that can be jarring to modern ears.

They were not masochists. They did not love suffering for its own sake. But they recognized something that we, in our comfort-oriented culture, are prone to forget: the inner life is a battleground, and the absence of battle does not necessarily mean victory. Sometimes it means desertion.

When John the Dwarf reported that he had no enemy, the elder heard something alarming.

A Christian without any inner struggle is not a Christian who has conquered sin; it is more likely a Christian who has stopped paying attention. 

Or worse, a Christian who has become so comfortable with a diminished interior life that the passions no longer need to announce themselves because they have already won.

The apostle Paul understood this dynamic intimately. In his letter to the Romans, he wrote with raw honesty: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is that which I do” (Romans 7:19, NRSV).

Far from being a confession of defeat, this is actually a sign of profound spiritual awareness. Paul could feel the tension because Paul was alive to the struggle. He was engaged. He was in the fight.

Consider how different this is from the person who never notices any inner conflict at all. Paul’s anguish was evidence of his attentiveness to the movements of grace and sin within him. His warfare was proof that the Spirit was at work, illuminating the dark corners and calling him further up and further in.

 

Why the Fight Matters

The elder’s wisdom points to something counterintuitive but deeply biblical: spiritual growth does not happen in the absence of resistance but through it.

The Letter of James opens with an astonishing instruction: “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2-4).

Joy in trials. Maturity through testing. Completeness forged in the furnace of endurance. This is not a theology of comfort. It is a theology of transformation, and transformation is never painless.

Think of it this way. A muscle that is never strained never grows. A vine that is never pruned never bears fruit. Jesus Himself used this image: “Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit” (John 15:2).

Pruning is not punishment. It is cultivation. But if you are the branch, it feels an awful lot like loss.

The passions that John the Dwarf wanted removed, those disordered desires and impulses that pull us away from God, are not simply obstacles to be eliminated. They are the very terrain on which humility is learned. Every time we recognize our weakness, every time we fall and get up again, every time we cry out to God because we cannot manage on our own, we are being shaped.

We are being hollowed out so that something greater can fill us.

This is why the elder did not celebrate John’s passionless calm. Without the awareness of his own brokenness, John was in danger of losing the one thing that kept him close to God: his desperate need for God. A person who believes they have no enemy has no reason to call for reinforcements. A person who feels no hunger has no reason to come to the table.

 

The Better Prayer

What strikes me most about this story is not the elder’s advice but John’s response. When the warfare returned, “he no longer prayed that it might be taken away, but said, ‘Lord, give me strength for the fight.’”

This is one of the most mature prayers in all of Christian literature. In a single sentence, John moved from a spirituality of escape to a spirituality of engagement. He stopped asking God to change his circumstances and started asking God to change him within his circumstances. He stopped seeking the absence of difficulty and started seeking the presence of God in the middle of it.

This shift mirrors one of the most important moments in all of Scripture. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want” (Matthew 26:39).

Even the Son of God, in His human nature, felt the instinct to ask for the removal of suffering. But He moved through that prayer to something deeper: surrender, trust, and the willingness to walk the hard road with the Father rather than around it.

Paul, too, learned this lesson. He wrote of a “thorn in the flesh” that tormented him, and he asked three times for it to be removed. The answer he received was not removal but something far more profound: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Power made perfect in weakness. Not power that replaces weakness. Not power that eliminates weakness. Power that is perfected, completed, brought to its fullest expression precisely in and through weakness.

Paul’s response echoes John the Dwarf’s transformed prayer: “So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me” (2 Corinthians 12:9). He did not merely tolerate his weakness. He boasted in it, because he had learned that his weakness was the doorway through which Christ’s power entered his life.

 

The Humility We Cannot Manufacture

The elder told John that he needed to regain “the affliction and humility” he used to have. Notice that affliction and humility are linked. This is not accidental.

True humility, the Desert Fathers understood, is not something we can generate through willpower or good intentions. It is something that is given to us through the experience of our own limitation.

When we struggle and fail, when we come face to face with the stubborn reality that we cannot save ourselves, when the passions rage and we discover again that we are not as strong or as holy as we imagined, we are standing on holy ground. We are in the place where grace meets us, because grace can only be received by open hands, and our hands only open when we realize they are empty.

This is the great paradox at the heart of the spiritual life: we must be weak to be strong, poor to be rich, broken to be made whole.

 

Living in the Fight

So what does this mean for us today, in our ordinary lives far removed from the Egyptian desert?

First, stop being afraid of the struggle. When you feel the pull of disordered desires, when old patterns resurface, when prayer feels like a battle rather than a retreat, do not assume you are failing. You may be more alive to God’s work in you than you have ever been.

Second, pay attention to seasons of spiritual numbness. If you feel no inner tension, no awareness of your need for God, no sense that anything in you requires transformation, that may not be peace. It may be sleep. Ask God to wake you up, even if waking up means returning to the fight.

Third, change your prayer. Stop asking only for the removal of difficulty and begin asking for the strength to meet it. “Lord, give me strength for the fight” is a prayer that trusts God’s presence in the struggle rather than demanding God’s rescue from it.

Finally, let your weakness teach you humility. The next time you fall, the next time you discover yet again that you are not the person you wish you were, do not despair. Instead, let that moment drive you back to the God who meets you precisely there, in the dust, with empty hands, ready to receive what you could never earn.

The soul makes progress by warfare. Not because God delights in our pain, but because the fight is where we learn that we cannot do this alone. And learning that we cannot do this alone is the beginning of real victory.