Stage Three — ABIDING

How should one remain?

A Word Before the Third Stage

My friend,

This is the stage where the road changes character, and I want to tell you plainly what changes, because if you carry the habits of the first two stages into this one you will exhaust yourself.

So far, everything has depended on your effort. Choose the Way of Life each morning. Watch your speech. Audit yourself weekly. Clean the lens. All of it required you to do something, and the doing was right.

Now I am going to tell you that the engine has to change.

Not that effort ends — it does not, and anyone who tells you it does is selling something. But the source of the effort moves. Up to now you have been generating your own power, and it has probably been working reasonably well. It will not keep working. Nobody sustains a lifetime of moral seriousness on willpower. The people who try either collapse or harden, and I have watched both happen to better people than me.

I want to name a thing you may be feeling right now, because it arrives almost universally at this point and people are ashamed of it.

You may have noticed that you are tired.

You have been at this a while. You have made real progress and you can see it. And underneath the progress there is a low hum of weariness, and perhaps a suspicion that you cannot keep this up for thirty years, and perhaps a quiet fear that the whole thing depends on your not getting tired.

That fear is correct about the arithmetic and wrong about the arrangement. It does not depend on you. This stage is where you find that out.

A note on a word. You will see me use abiding and remaining interchangeably, and there is a reason. The Greek word in John's Gospel is menein — to remain, to stay, to dwell. Older translations render it abide, which is a lovely word but has acquired a mist of piety around it. The World English Bible translates it plainly: "Remain in me."

I find the plainness useful. Abide can sound like a spiritual technique. Remain sounds like what it is: stay put. Don't leave.

That is the whole instruction of this stage, and it is much harder than it sounds, and it requires almost nothing of your strength.