Wisdom of the Desert
Desert
is usually understood as a barren land but who in the wildest dream would have
thought that this place could be rendered so fecund for spirituality other than
the desert fathers and mothers. They saw life where others anticipated death;
where one expects thorns and bushes the monks and ascetics unearthed the seeds
of wisdom. Desert is the battlefield of uncertainties. One really does not know
what to expect. It needs courage to refuse the security offered by walls and
roof and embrace the loo wind of vulnerability. This courage finds its
subsistence in faith. In an empirical world, faith usually becomes an idea of
mockery. Our obsession with certainty has obstructed us to believe in the
beauty of randomness. Our pursuit of attesting logical reasoning to every
experience is most often at the expense of belittling the mysterious dimension
of life. Faith is the audacity to grapple with the uncertainties of life with
the implicit hope that it would eventually lead us to the crossroads of
enlightenment. Faith is not a rigidified code of conduct unlike belief. Belief
begets servitude while faith begets freedom. The invitation of Jesus before us is
to enter the realm of contingencies along with him to experience the radical
possibilities of uncertainty. This could seem a paradox but paradox lies at the
heart of Christian spirituality. Simon Critchley opines;
Faith hopes for grace…faith is
not certainty, but is only gained by going into the desert and undergoing
diabolical temptation and radical doubt. On this view, the enemy of faith is
not doubt. On the contrary, it is certainty. If faith becomes certainty then…
we have become diabolical. There are no guarantees in faith. It is defined by
an essential insecurity, tempered by doubt and defined by a radical experience
of freedom.[1]
The
wisdom of the desert, which is derived from the web of uncertainties, inspires
many in their faith journey until today. St Anthony, who could invariably be
considered as the Father of Desert Monasticism deeply touched me. Having lost
his parents at a young age, he was left alone with his sister. In his ripe age
of youth, St Anthony was greatly influenced by the words of Christ in the
Gospel according to Matthew 19:21 “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your
possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in
heaven; then come, follow me.” He literally sold his possession to the
villagers and the money he gained, he gave to the poor reserving a little for
his sister’s sake. Having entrusted his sister to faithful virgins in a
convent, St Anthony set out to the desert of Egypt to live a life of an ascetic
in solitude. St Anthony intrigued me to contemplate primarily on two prominent
concepts which I would share briefly.
1.
Glory of Solitude
The
world has become precariously chaotic. It is easy to be wafted by this chaos
but to creatively confront it, a deliberate seclusion is necessary to return
with deeper conviction and greater impetus. Solitude is the refusal to succumb
to the incognizance of the world. Momentum demands withdrawal; a withdrawal
which is ephemeral. We withdraw not because we fear but to never fear again.
Solitude is such a withdrawal with a noble motive to know ourselves deeper; to
know our fragility, strength, weakness, vulnerability, fear, emotional
stability etc. Solitude is a battle with the self to realize our basic being.
It is in solitude that the true nature of a person springs.
People
naively think that solitude and loneliness are the same which is false. Kim
Haines reminds us that “solitude is being alone while loneliness is feeling
alone.” Solitude is more existential while loneliness is more of abstraction. Poet
Marianne Moore has even argued that “the cure for loneliness is solitude.”[2]
Paul Tillich further remarks; “Language has created the word ‘loneliness to
express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express
the glory of being alone.”[3]
The concept of solitude becomes really elusive when it needs to be explained.
For this reason few would find the vocation of desert fathers and mothers to be
puzzling. People might even look upon asceticism with suspicion as to what kind
of vocation is this wherein one refuses the pleasure of sexual intimacy; the
bliss of a constant companion; the liberty to be disoriented, the craving of
delicacies; the severing of consanguine family ties and many more common
existential precepts. Monks are the ones who appropriate an extended version of
family. Metropolitan Emilianos Timiadis
of Sylibria argues;
Monks practice poverty not
because the administration of wealth is an evil in itself – if this were so,
how could Christ have worked as a carpenter? – but on the contrary because the
existence in society of a group of devoted men and women, who have freely given
up the right to possess wealth, may help others in that society to escape from
a life which makes the acquisition of wealth its supreme end. Monks are called
to celibacy, not to despise conjugal life or marriage but on the contrary to
give a witness to the transfiguration of the sexual instinct in marriage and in
celibacy so that people can serve higher goals and become servants of the
spirit. Monks are called to obedience, not in order to escape their
responsibilities of adulthood but in order to help man escape the instinct of
self-centeredness and self-dependence so that he increasingly depends on the
will of God and less and less on his own.[4]
Solitude
is an effort to acknowledge that we are unaware and the importance of being all
the more aware. In solitude we are enlightened by the fact that our essential
being is selfless and communitarian and not narcissistic. We do realize that
our emotions are correlated and our well-being depends on the well-being of our
fellow brothers and sisters. Prayer, celebration, fellowship, worship are no
longer individual enclosures but the visible expressions of our social
accountability rooted in the kenotic love of Christ. Solitude is our consent to
God to teach us in a more radical pedagogy.
Some people find that in their
first experiences of solitude and silence they wrestle with frightful emotions
and fantasies. Some dark void in them beckons them to jump over the edge. It
does not take long to realize why we avoid ourselves. If you stay with
solitude, you discover that this inner void is your friend. It is your true hunger.
It has God’s name on it.[5]
In solitude there is a constant conflict
between the mind and the heart. St. Anthony says: “For the one who
wishes to live in solitude there is only one conflict and that is with the
heart.” Your thoughts disobey you; your body purposely grows weary to deter you
and your weakness comes to the forefront to shame you. Solitude is really
painful. But we need to bear in mind what Kahlil Gibran said; “Your pain is the
breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. It is the bitter potion
by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the
physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity.”[6]
Celibate
priests, monks and nuns are the ones most prone to endure solitude. Celibacy is a
unique vocation and should not be a mere precursor for episcopacy. Heed the
words of Bishop Hilarion (Alfeyev);
The call to
monasticism is, above all, a vocation for solitude, a love for worship, for
prayer. If a person takes monasticism for something else, then he will not
stand the burden of loneliness. You cannot become a monk just because you did
not find a suitable bride. You cannot accept monasticism solely because it was
blessed by the elder or confessor, without a heartfelt desire for inner prayer
life.[7]
2. The Pedagogy of Wilderness
Wilderness
has a unique pedagogy. It is in wilderness humans meet their finitude. We truly
understand the pain of being human. Arch B. Taylor considers the wilderness the
real place where incarnation of Christ happened. He remarks;
In a certain sense it might truly
be said that the Incarnation occurred at this point (in the wilderness) rather
than at the conception or birth. For here, for the first time, Jesus became
fully aware of the possibility of being something else besides human, and he
made the deliberate, conscious decision to remain a man. In choice to identify
himself completely with humankind he also committed himself to the cross.
Subsequent decisions only made plain what was implicit here.[8]
Wilderness
becomes the battle ground of our real self and ideal self. To augment the
intensity of this onslaught, temptations become the catalyst. Most often we
survive by trading our inherent image of God to the evil one. Guilt permeates
our being, urges us to repent and before we know we have grown. One who has not
met his weakness vis-à-vis has never known the sweetness of transformation.
Wilderness thus becomes a subversive educational arena with temptations as the
pedagogy and Spirit as the teacher. The Temptation of Jesus in the wilderness
could be considered a frame of reference. The visualization of this event by
Barbara Brown Taylor is indeed poignant. She writes;
The wilderness Jesus was driven
into was probably the desert south of Jericho, where the Jordan River feeds
into the Dead Sea. You can see for miles in every direction there, and it is
all sand-coloured: the hills, the rocks, the brush, and the scorpions. It is
also very quiet, both because the sand absorbs sound and because there are not
many living things to make any noise. If you sit still in that desert all by
yourself, then you will soon notice a mechanical humming between your ears,
roughly equivalent to the sound of a small electric clock. This is the sound of
your nervous system at work, with all its elaborate wiring and sparking synapses.
Once you have gotten used to it, you will begin to notice how much noise you
make when you breathe. Your lungs might as well be fireplace bellows, with all
that wheezing in and out. When you breathe in, you can hear the wind whistling
through what sounds like your hollow skull, and when you breathe out you can
hear the roar it makes as it rushes out through the narrow passageway of your
nose.[9]
Wilderness
imparts us the wisdom of suffering. There is no greater pain than the pain of
growth. A holistic growth mandates suffering and tears. One whose eyes have not
welled with tears of suffering has never known the joy of a lucid vision. One
whose heart has not been laden with guilt has never felt the ecstasy of
repentance and the bliss of forgiveness. To deal with suffering is an art. The
incarnation of God equips us with this art. The Scripture testifies that Christ
was perfected by sufferings (Heb. 5:8). To empathise with the hungry we need to
know the pain of hunger, to liberate the captive we need to feel the
suffocation of confinement; to comprehend the grief of the poor we need to
experience the anguish of poverty. The urgency of liberation can only be
understood by someone who has breathed the air of bondage.
Suffering
deepens our faith and enhances our vision of the divine. One of the fascinating things in the narrative
of Job is that Job does not wrestle with Satan but with God. His questions and
apprehensions are directed towards the divine. Suffering thus becomes an
opportunity to debate with God on the mystery of life; a debate in which we
engage with the hope of losing but still is worth it. In a conversation between
Nikos Kazantzakis and the ascetic Fr. Makarios recorded in Report to Greco;
“Do
you still wrestle with the Devil, Father Makarios?” I asked him.
“Not
any longer, my child. I have grown old now and he has grown old with me. He
doesn't have the strength. I wrestle with God.”
“With
God!” I exclaimed in astonishment. “And you hope to win?”
“I
hope to lose, my child. My bones remain with me still, and they continue to
resist.”
“Yours
is a hard life, Father. I too want to be saved. Is there no other way?”
“More
agreeable?” asked the ascetic, smiling compassionately.
“More
human, Father.”
“One.
Only one.”
“What
is it?”
“Ascent.
To climb a series of steps. From the full stomach to hunger, from the slaked
throat to thirst, from joy to suffering. God sits at the summit of hunger,
thirst, and suffering. The Devil sits at the summit of the comfortable life.
Choose.”
“I
am still young. The earth is good. I have time to choose.”
The
ascetic stretched out his five bony fingers, squeezed my knee, and nudged me.
“Wake
up, my child. Wake up. Before death wakes you up.”
I
shuddered[10].
To
conclude, in a capitalistic world view, meditation, fast, renunciation and the
like that antagonize the existing pro-consumeristic system is reckoned as a
threat and strong attempts are made to decimate it; since lent helps us to muster
the prudence to say “enough” it is anti-capitalist. In “The Sayings of the
Desert Fathers” “The devil once asked a monk, who was sitting, doing nothing,
“What are you doing here?’’ To which the monk replied, ‘‘I am doing nothing; I
am simply keeping this place.’’[11]
Monks are called to keep the places of the commons from the predatory gaze of the
greedy capitalists who belittle the intrinsic value of anything and focus
exclusively on the instrumental and lucrative value. To choose to abstain when you have the
resources to acquire could be appropriated as foolishness but Christians have a
tradition of being fools for Christ.[12]
Prayers
Dn.
Basil Paul
[1]
Simon Critchley, “Can Religion make you Free? A Sermon on Diabolic Happiness”
in Political Theology 14/4, 2013,
509.
[2] Kim Haines-Eitzen, “In Praise of Joyful
Solitude” in https://sojo.net/articles/praise-joyful-solitude.
Posted on 9th February 2018.
[3]
Paul Tillich, Eternal Now (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), 5. https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/the-eternal-now.pdf.
[4] Metropolitan
Emilianos Timiadis, “The Missionary Dimension of Monasticism” in Ion Bria
ed. Martyria/Mission: The Witness of the Orthodox Churches Today (Geneva:
World Council of Churches, 1980), 43.
[8]
Arch B. Taylor Jr. “Decision in the Desert: The Temptation of Jesus in the
light of Deuteronomy” Union Seminary
Magazine, 14/3, 303.
[9]
Barbara Brown Taylor, “Four Stops in the Wilderness” in Journal for Preachers Lent 2001, 3.
[10]
“A Conversation between the Ascetic Father Makarios and Nikos Kazantzakis” http://www.honeyandhemlock.com/2019/03/a-conversation-between-ascetic-father.html?fbclid=IwAR2u3PY1UXj6LvMN8fG30r1-Stj90rCkU8DPj0RzBHf4_oC7tq8VRn7BB8g
[11] “Icons,
liturgy, saints: ecological insights from orthodox spirituality” https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Icons%2C+liturgy%2C+saints%3A+ecological+insights+from+orthodox+spirituality-a0243955955.
[12] Mother
Maria calls for the revival of the tradition of the yurodivy, the fool for
Christ. Katerina Kocandrle Bauer, “Non-Fundamentalist
Monastic Spirituality of Mother Maria Skobtsova”
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