It is important to the monks to provide a concrete structure for their day and their spiritual exercises. At first glance that seems to be a superficial matter. In reality it decides whether life is going to succeed or not. A healthy spirituality needs a healthy way of life.
“Father Poimen used to say, ‘We found three bodily experiences with Father Pambo: daily fasting till evening, silence, and a great deal of manual labor.'” With these exercises Pambo reached spiritual maturity. Perseverance in these three things transformed him. In a similar way Anthony learned from an angel how his life could succeed. When he morosely asked the angel what he should do, he saw someone like himself:
“He sat there and worked, then got up from his work, wove a rope, then got up again to pray. And behold, it was an angel of the Lord, who had been sent to give Anthony instruction and safety. And he heard the angel say: ‘Act this way, and you will win salvation.’ When he heard that, he was filled with great joy and courage, and by doing this he found redemption.”
The clear organization of the day, the healthy combination of prayer and work, of sitting and standing up, of weaving ropes and praying, is the path to inner peace. It clarifies negative feelings and establishes order in the person.
Father John is reported to have engaged in another practice: “It is said that when he came home from harvesting or from a get-together with the elders, he first took time for prayer, meditation, and psalm-singing, until his thoughts were restored to an orderly state.” John doesn’t simply allow free range to the emotions that have been stirred up by conversation with his brothers. First he takes time for prayer, so that his emotions can settle. When we bring home unsettled emotions and stuff them with lots of activity (of whatever kind), then they take root in the unconscious, and from there they spread a feeling of discontent. Just as our external life should be put in order, so should our thought processes.
Disorganized thinking, the fathers tell us, gets the monks into a muddle and deliver them up to their passions. Those who give free rein to their thoughts and feelings without confronting them will be inwardly infected by them. Without noticing it, they will be driven by unconscious impulses and lose their freedom.
A similar story is told of John: “Once when he was on his way to the church in the skete and heard some brothers disputing there, he returned to his kellion. He walked around it three times, and only then did he go in. A few brothers who saw that, but couldn’t imagine why he was doing it, came to him and asked him. But he answered: ‘My ears were full of the wrangles, so I walked about to cleanse them, so that I could enter my kellion in peace.”’ Here John does not take his thoughts home to quiet them down. Rather he frees himself from them even before he goes in. Walking is for him a way to shake off the negative emotions he met with among the disputing brothers.
~Anselm Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You: Wisdom from the Desert Fathers
