Another method of dealing with our thoughts and feelings, our passions and needs, consists in thinking them all the way through to the end, in picturing to ourselves all the consequences of admitting the passions into the imagination. In this way we can also discover which way the passions actually want to lead us. Sexual fantasies, for example, stand for something quite different, for the longing to be free, to let oneself fall, to be able to surrender. If I constantly wage war on my sexual fantasies and repress them, they will keep returning. When I think and feel them to the end, they can metamorphose into a drive for life, into an impetus toward God.
It is reported of Father Olympios that he allowed the thought of taking a wife to enter his mind, down to the least details. Indeed, he made a woman out of clay, looked at her, and said: “Look, that’s your wife. Now you have to work to feed her. And he worked with great effort. After a day he again shaped clay and made a daughter out of it, and he told himself: your wife has had a child! Now you have to work even harder to feed and clothe your child. In so doing he worked himself to the bone, and so he told himself: if you can’t bear all this labor, then don’t go longing for a wife. God saw his exertion and took away the struggle from him, and he found rest.”
Father Olympios allowed room for the wish to sleep with a woman. Indeed he made himself one out of clay. He looked straight at his desire. But he also confronted the desire with reality. Living with a woman would mean working for her. Perhaps the argument strikes us as somewhat simplistic: not wanting a wife just because of all the work. But the decisive feature here is that, on the one hand, Olympios handles his need for a woman without anxiety: he not only imagines her; he forms a woman out of clay and really looks at her. But, on the other hand, he doesn’t stop with the beautiful fantasy of living and sleeping with the woman: he envisions the consequences. He measures his desire against reality. And because his wish is thought out all the way into sober reality, it loses its threatening quality. Now he can deal soberly with his desire.
The problem of men and women celibates is that they get romantic notions of marriage. The question of whether they should marry or not can’t be decided by some romantic idea, but by the sober question: is this really my path? I can find out whether it is or isn’t by looking at the consequences. But this method doesn’t apply just to celibates. Many people dream their way into castles in the air. They become restless because imagination promises them a far more beautiful world than the one they have. Here Olympios’s method helps them to bring those castles down to earth, to confront fantasy with reality, to imagine it with all its consequences. Then it becomes transformed; it shows me what really wants to live in me and how I can connect this wish with reality, without simply chucking my previous life plans.
~Anselm Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You: Wisdom from the Desert Fathers
