The Desert Fathers and Mothers were early Christian hermits, ascetics, and monks who withdrew from cities to the desert to live in the desert wilderness of Egypt, apart from the world of the Roman Empire. They didn’t want to leave society because they were persecuted. Actually they chose to leave because much of the persecutions had ended upon the conversion of Emperor Constantine. The Christians were now privileged in countless ways. But these privileges did not lead to the transformation to which Christ called them, but, instead, to a framework of comfort, uniformity, and dominance that seemed only to lead to temptation. The Desert Fathers and Mothers recognized that they had to find a freedom from that world (the beginnings of what is styled “Christendom”) before they could return to it in any kind of loving and helpful way. They found that freedom not only by journeying into the wilderness, but by journeying within, by seeking the path of contemplation.
In The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Benedicta Ward recorded a brief but memorable rendition of one of the desert sayings which outlined the usual trajectory of a desert ascetic: “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.’”
The desert mystics discovered the surprising grace of being in one’s cell, or humble room, alone. This was not just a place that was protected from the world, but it was a place where one could explore the unexpectedly dynamic spaces of solitude and silence. In that purposeful isolation, they discovered that God was present and active! They experienced the Love of God in a lively mixture of humility and awe, a new focus that brought new life.
With the seemingly inexhaustible power of this pandemic to disrupt our lives and isolate us, to disrupt our community of faith, family, and friends, I wonder if the Desert Fathers and Mothers have something to teach us, some resource to help us as some of us experience solitudes and silences that we never expected?
We have made such a great effort to be sure that you can experience our parish liturgies in some way whether you are here or elsewhere, through a home speaker or screen. But I hope that this does not suggest that we would be lost without these technologies. From time to time, we all need reminding, myself included, that God makes his way to us through glorious sung liturgy and through silence, through worship in a full church and through worship in solitude. I think of how Christ, during his earthly ministry, consistently oscillated between time in crowds and time alone, even in the desert for large spans of time.
I wrote last week about music, and how important music is to my spirituality and that of our parish. But these abbas and ammas, these intense early Christians, knew lives transformed by silence, silence filled with quiet prayer and contemplation. And it was not their preaching, necessarily, but their intentional presence and minimal speech that transformed the lives of others. They demonstrated that the simple rhythms of life outside of the sacred services, their walking, sitting, making rope, and falling asleep, that all of these things, if done with devotion and care, can serve as forms of prayer, even avenues of conversion.
Finding God in silence or in solitude is perhaps much more difficult when, because of a crisis, you didn’t choose these states of being. But I hope it is some comfort to know that, whether we chose it or not, the Desert Fathers and Mothers revealed that the absence of music and the absence of each other does not mean the absence of God. In truth, God in Christ is the light that shines in the darkness, the bell that rings in the silence, and the presence that comes to us, as in the Beginning, ex nihilo.
With every blessing,
Matthew Moretz+
