As we enter the new year, we inevitably look back on our actions in 2025 and ask ourselves, “Am I proud of that?”  Some of us make resolutions to help address the areas we want to change, while others make less formal plans in the hope that some flexibility might make things a little easier to apply.  This year, I’m a member of the latter group.  Resolutions are hard and I have a tendency to break them within a month or two.  Even so, I’m looking for ways to enter into this new year with resolve to be better than I was last year, and to that end, I’m back with an old friend, Isaiah the Solitary.

Isaiah the Solitary was a monk that lived in Gaza around 1500 years ago, and truth be told, I’m not even aware of how many works he wrote.  I’m only familiar with one, and yet that one is as brief and strange as it needs to be to keep me coming back: On Guarding the Intellect: Twenty-Seven Texts.  When he says “texts,” he really means paragraphs, which means this is the sort of thing you can gobble up in five or so minutes.  That said, it’s not an easy read.  Part of it comes from the language that he uses.  He talks about developing “the intellect” and avoiding “the passions,” which vaguely sounds like he wants you to learn a lot and not get excited about it.  But when we learn his vocabulary, we can see what he’s trying to get at.  When Isaiah talks about “the intellect,” he’s talking about the highest part of our soul, responsible for our journey towards God.  When he talks about “the passions,” he’s talking about the sins that distract us, ensnare us, and pull us away from God.  So really, he’s spending twenty-seven paragraphs trying to help us learn how to pursue God and avoid sin, and that’s something that any of us could use.

Part of what makes Isaiah’s advice so compelling is that it comes from a place so vastly removed from our own. He wrote over a thousand years ago, over a thousand miles away, in a life circumstance that none of us can really relate to (again, he was a monk, and if you look at his name, you can see he wasn’t a particularly social one).  There’s a real need to listen to Christians across time and space.  We all enter the world with certain blind spots that we inherit from the culture we’re born in.  There’s not a lot we can do on our own to see them; it would be like a fish critiquing water!  We know what we know, and it’s hard to address what we don’t know.  But when we read from people that wrote so long ago, they can see things that we don’t see and address realities we don’t regularly address.  

For example, one of Isaiah’s key interests?  Detachment.  In his words, detachment is “death in relation to every person or thing,” (text 25).  That sounds intense!  But consider how often we are shaped by desires related to the world around us.  We want certain people to admire us.  We want to acquire certain goods.  We want to be praised for our work and to avoid losing what we have.  Why?  Because too often, we think in terms of worldly success: we love to gain and hate to lose.  If we’re busy carrying that burden, how can we serve God effectively?  What if the things he asks of us involve loss?  What if we get a swollen ego from praise and start to see ourselves as greater than Him?  What if repeated failure (by the world’s standards) leads us to a level of depression that stops us from loving God well?  That’s why Isaiah urges us towards detachment.  The more we can remove ourselves from the love of the world’s things, the more we can keep ourselves away from the passions (sins in our heart) and grow towards God.

Isaiah never presents this as something that’s easy or normal.  To the contrary, he talks about it like it’s a great battle that we’re called to.  It’s all about “guarding our heart” against sin and “casting out” evils and “competing in the arena” of life.  Militaristic language for faith doesn’t see broad use today, but it really does capture the seriousness of sin.  Avoiding sin isn’t just a matter of politeness or decency; it’s a matter of life and death.  If we want to turn towards God, it’s not an uncontested goal, and the stakes are high.  While I imagine some might find that stressful, it’s a strangely comforting realization for me.  Life may not be easy, but it’s also not frivolous.

To a comfortable people living in a consumer culture, Isaiah’s advice is strange and wonderful.  It’s a wake up call, it’s encouragement, and it’s a reminder to let go of what we don’t need to be holding.  We all have burdens weighing us down.  The battle is letting go and looking to God.  If we can do that, there’s a life in Him just waiting for us.