The Path to the Desert
“A brother came to Scetis to visit Abba Moses and asked him for a word. The old man said to him, ‘Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”‘ [1]
The roots of desert monasticism lay in distractions the desert elders experienced in the inhabited world. They withdrew to the desert where more intense dedication to God was possible. It is tempting to see this as a retreat from “the real world,” and for some that was undoubtedly true. Yet the wisdom of the desert elders demonstrates that while their motives may have been mixed, their primary purpose was not to renounce life, but to embrace a more authentic human life. At the same time, they learned that the path to such authenticity required difficult renunciation. The ammas and abbas experienced this tension between the need to let go of the futility of their former lives and their desire for transformation as spiritual warfare. Warfare may seem like an inappropriate image for spiritual formation in our age of terrorism and world conflicts. Yet it was an honest image for the desert elders because it pointed to what they considered a difficult life and death struggle. Their spiritual warfare required letting go of all the self-imposed barriers, psychological wounds and misuse of human desires which deflect the grace of God and deny the image of God in a person. St. Paul described this tension between our natural desire for God and our human weakness with transparent honesty in his Letter to the Romans:
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death’ (Rom 7:21-24, NRSV).
The uniqueness and mysterious lure of the desert is that a human being must learn to live within the limitations of its environment. Eventually it will strip us of the self-imposed defenses which deny our true nature, or “inmost self,” as Paul described it. But it is no easy or casual task. The challenges of the desert dilute self-assertion and self-reliance. It will not tolerate impatience or “quick-fix” spiritual disciplines. The intense silence of the desert mentors a person to listen to someone besides one’s self. It is God’s auditorium of the Spirit. “Therefore, I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her” (Hos 2:14, NRSV). But we must let go of self in order to hear that tender voice. And that is not easy.
Amma Syncletica said, “… it is essential to be trained in austerities, I mean by fasting, by sleeping on the ground and by other austerities in turn. … For those who have not proceeded in this fashion, but who have suddenly rushed into rejecting their possessions are generally seized with regret.” [2]
The teaching of Jesus exhorted a “dying to self” in order to gain one’s self. In the world of the third and fourth centuries, the Christian ideal was entrance into the Kingdom of God through a life of penance and renunciation, largely in rejection of the worldliness and anxieties of life in the late Roman Empire.
Amma Theodora said, “Let us strive to enter by the narrow gate. Just as the trees, if they have not stood before the winter’s storms cannot bear fruit, so it is with us; this present age is a storm and it is only through many trials and temptations that we can obtain an inheritance in the kingdom of heaven.” [3]
David G.R. Keller, Oasis of Wisdom: the Worlds of the Desert Fathers and Mothers
Notes:
1. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection., trans. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G, (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984) Moses 6, 139.
2. Pseudo-Athanasius, The Life of Blessed Syncletica, trans. Elizabeth Bryson Bongie (Toronto: Peregrina, 1999) v. 31, 26.
3. Ward, Sayings, Theodora 5, 83-84.
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