Archive, Readings
Desert Fathers 12
Below is the text of the twelfth episode in the series Desert Fathers in a Year. You can find it in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
A brother came to Scetis, to Abba Moses, asking for a word from him. The elder said to him: ‘Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.’
This scenario defines the very genre of the Desert Fathers’ sayings. A monk comes along to see another monk, asking for ‘a word’. Sometimes the question is put on the basis of specific challenge. A fellow may be troubled by an apparently congenital vice, a persistent distraction, or a painful memory that will not go away. He seeks the counsel of someone experienced, who has already passed through the parched land in which he feels lost, eager to know how he might overcome temptation, become firm in faith, and find freedom. At other times, the questioner will ask for ‘a word’ in an open-ended manner, trusting in the elder’s ability to know what he needs to hear, letting the Holy Spirit act through the grace of the moment and of the encounter. That is what is going on here.
Abba Moses, a released slave and former bandit, was known for his non-judgemental charity and exemplary life. The visitor, confident in Moses’s discernment, asks for general wisdom to live by, no doubt hoping to glimpse something of the secret of the other man’s intimacy with God, his holiness.
Abba Moses’s answer may seem curt. It subverts the question. ‘What are you doing running around asking for advice’, he seems to say, ‘instead of confronting yourself and your own reality before the face of God.’ It is easy to have a mistaken idea of the monk’s cell. We may imagine it, perhaps, as a place of unfailing peace and spiritual graces, a bright, tidy room with a table, a chair, a nicely made bed and a pile of leather-bound books, a room in which a friendly candle flickers and a ginger cat sleeps soundly by the stove.
By all means, the cell can be like that, sometimes. It does have the aspect of a sanctuary. More fundamentally, though, it is a battle field, a spacial concentrate of the all-encompassing desert into which the monk retreats to shun distractions without and get to know the mess he carries within. The counsel to ‘go and sit in your cell’ is an exhortation to stop fidgeting. It was topical in Abba Moses’s day. It is urgent now. Have we not, in fact, almost entirely lost the ability to sit still? Our minds are restless. Our bodies, too. We keep looking for new models of self-improvement, new gurus, books and resources, constantly persuaded that we must be doing things, that the key to the riddle of existence ever eludes us.
Abba Moses tells the roaming seeker that he has been found. He advises him to focus on this fact. It makes sense. The questioner, a monk, has heard God’s call, felt the freshness of God’s Spirit. His task, now, is to let the Spirit work, convicting him ‘concerning sin and righteousness and judgment’, guiding him into ‘all truth’. Instead of practising spiritual tourism, seeking out abbas to ask for a word (so to to tell friends, ‘Now, Abba Moses, whom I happen to know, told me…’), he should be silent and patient, inclining the ear of his heart to own his deep need, to cry out for mercy, to receive God’s quiet healing touch, in this way to learn what thanksgiving is, and praise.
The cell in this story represents the place to which God’s providence assigns us: for some it will be a monastic enclosure; for some, marriage. For others it will be a task: a needy person to look after, a sickness to bear, a reconciliation to effect. The cell can at times seem like Peniel by Jabbok, where Jacob wrestled all night till daybreak with a messenger of God who left him limp. At other times it can be like that cave on Horeb where Elijah perceived the passing of the glory of the Lord of hosts. Whether our lot today is struggle or rest is not all that important. What matters is to let God act as he sees fit and not to miss his visitation because, instead of being peacefully present in our cell, our tent of meeting, we are out and about, driving downtown distributing questionnaires on the spiritual life to passers-by.
The kind of sitting Abba Moses speaks of is no passive waiting. No, patience is an active state of existence that enables concentration of energy, orientation of purpose. A frequent cause of unhappiness is the dispersal of vitality, a sense of being pulled in many directions at once, getting a little bit of this, a little bit of that, never enjoying anything entirely. Over time we are left frustrated and weary. Is it not significant that so many people one meets these days complain, first, of having no time, then, of being very tired?
We hear an intriguing resonance of Abba Moses’s words 1300 years later, in a fragment by Pascal, the French philosopher. Pascal wrote during the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, who introduced on a grand scale the dictatorship of fashion. Considering the foolishness people get up to surrendered to their vanity and superficial ambitions, Pascal reflected that, ‘all mankind’s misfortune is traceable to a single cause: inability to remain at rest in a room.’ ‘At rest’, en repos; Pascal, who knew the spirituality of the Desert, whose sister was a nun, could have written, ‘in hesychia’. To outstay agitation can be a daunting proposition, at first a cause of jitteriness, but is the foundation of wisdom, so of sound, free choice.
Blaise Pascal (1623-62). A copy of the painting of François II Quesnel, made for Gérard Edelinck in 1691. Wikipedia.