Archive, Readings
Desert Fathers 10
[Abba Antony] also used to say: He who remains in the wilderness practising peace is relieved of three types of battle: that of hearing, that of speaking, and that of seeing. One only remains to him: that of the heart.
When Christ appears to his disciples after rising from the dead, the first thing he says is: ‘Peace’. Emerged from a struggle whose dimensions we are unfit to imagine, his victorious struggle against death’s reign, he comes bearing peace, even as, still in the heyday of his public ministry, he sent his disciples forth two by two to carry abroad his peculiar peace, which the world cannot give. The disciples were to carry no stuff of their own, no second pair of sandals, no purse, not even a staff to ward off mad dogs. The one thing they were to carry was peace, in such abundance that they could make a gift of it wherever they passed, yet be left with undiminished reserves.
Many of us yearn for peace, conscious of being agitated, uncentered, drawn in many different directions at once. I dare say we can recognise ourselves in a poem the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in 1879. It is one of the few poems I know by heart. I memorised it in my twenties. I needed it then. I clung to it.
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.
The image of the wood-dove is brilliant. Peace can seem quite as elusive, scared by the slightest noise or sudden shadow. We are left thinking, ‘No! Gone again!’, only to cry out, ‘When, Peace?’ Hopkins reminds us, though, that peace so easily perturbed is not yet perfect. Pure peace resists chaos and spreads itself within it, bringing about a loveliness of order where we least expected it. Peace is not reducible to sentiment. It manifests character formed in the hard school of patience, a virtue life gives us ample opportunity to practise. Patience, which broadens us, ‘plumes to peace’ at the opportune time. We shall find the mature dove stable, dependable, brooding like the Spirit on the waters of the first day of creation, sitting on eggs, engendering life.
The second chapter in the systematic collection of the Desert Fathers’ sayings deals with the subject of peace. It bears the overall title, ‘That it is needful to pursue peace with all one’s zeal.’ The Father’s term for ‘peace’ is hesychia. We may associate this word with ‘hesychasm’, a contemplative movement in the Eastern Church; however, it is not specific to the Orient. The Western monastic ideal of ‘pax’, a word inscribed over the gate of countless Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, a pledge to those who enter whether to visit or to remain, points in the same direction.
The fact that we are urged to ‘pursue’ peace zealously shows that the peace in question is not the tranquility of repose. To be at peace like the Fathers were is not to be lounging in a deckchair in a fragrant garden while angels, fluttering, refill our drinks. Peace is a dynamic reality to be followed determinedly, like the pillar of fire and cloud during Israel’s exodus. Remember Christ’s words, ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you’, words spoken in the Upper Room just before he told the eleven, Judas having slipped into the night, ‘Let us go hence’, to take them to Gethsemane, thence to enter into the wine press.
The peace we seek is not in contrast to the labour of discipleship; it presupposes this labour. Antony says as much in his pithy saying, which deals with peace-pursuit in the setting of eremitical life. One who withdraws from society to practise peace in this way (the text employs the participle hesychazōn — tellingly, the Greek noun for ‘peace’ gives rise to an active verb) is relieved, Antony says, of the battles of hearing, speaking, and seeing. That is the advantage of the desert, or of a monastic enclosure with no WiFi: one is freed from constant extraneous stimulus. There is quiet around. For a moment or two this feels wonderful. Peace at last! Then, though, the rumbling within begins. We realise what masses of noisy junk we carry, what unresolved tensions born of anger, jealousy, desire, anxiety, greed, all those movements of the heart the Fathers referred to as ‘passions’.
It is when the noise round about recedes that the inward work begins. We are faced with a considerable paradox: the ascetic withdraws into a context of outward peace in order to confront the unpeace he carries in his heart. He embarks on the battle to depetrify, purify, and enlarge his heart, to make it a fit abode for God’s love. Peace is not incompatible with this battle, at times very fierce, as long as we stay close to Christ, rejecting all that breaks our communion with him. ‘Christ is our peace’, writes St Paul. As long as we live with him, in him, peace will be our portion even when we do not sensibly perceive it.
Emerald-spotted wood dove (Turtur chalcospilos)