Archive, Readings
Desert Fathers 20
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One of the old men came to see Abba Achillas and saw him spitting blood from his mouth. So he asked him: ‘Father, what is that?’ The old man said: ‘It is the word of a brother, a word that caused me grief. I was fighting in order not to make it known and prayed God that he would take it away from me. The word became blood in my mouth. I spat it out, and now I am at peace. I have forgotten my grief.’
Even a seasoned desert father scorched by the sun and exposure to God’s truth remains human. Human beings are vulnerable. We are not covered by a carapace that protects us from the world or from the complex dynamics of relationships. Misunderstandings can arise, wounds can be inflicted in the desert as elsewhere. Do you want to see how far advanced a person is spiritually? Observe the way in which he or she negotiates such experience: it is an acid test.
St Benedict in his Rule urges monks to make peace before the sun goes down and to make sure it is not a false, counterfeit peace. Why extend your hand to another if in your heart resentment burns? To make peace presupposes inward battle. It is not enough just to make our minds up. The process engages us as at an affective and emotional level. Somehow we must deal with, and get over, the hurt we have endured, which may cut deep. Only in this way will we keep anger from carving out a foothold in our hearts. Such combat is non-negotiable; for nothing more effectively extinguishes the light of grace and the life of prayer in us than the passion of anger.
We catch a glimpse of Abba Achillas after one such ferocious battle. The word of a brother had hurt him. The circumstances are unknown to us. It is useless to speculate. But most of us know from experience what it is like to sustain the impact of an unfair utterance or one that touches a particular weakness of ours. We feel humiliated, at risk. We think: ‘How dare they speak to us like that?’ Inwardly we fret: ‘Help! Is this how other people, too, talk about me, view me?’ It is tempting to proceed, by way of self-defence, to attack. We usually do that by broadcasting our view, running down our adversary. We let others know what we have been through: ‘Will you believe what such-and-such had the effrontery to tell me?’ That way we readily slide down a slippery slope whose end is detraction, the death of charity.
A bitter word does not only do harm round about, however. It pollutes the source from which it springs. Think of Christ’s words to Peter about what defiles a woman or man. The context is a discourse about hypocrisy. The reference is to ‘the Pharisees and scribes’, people who make a public profession of faith and are keen to instruct others in it — rather like ourselves, in fact. They get upset when others do not punctiliously observe religious dietary rules. These rules contribute to the moral education of man. But is it ultimately what I eat that establishes my state of soul? Christ deals with the question matter-of-factly: ‘Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and so passes on?’ It goes down the drain, literally. ‘What comes out of the mouth’, meanwhile, ‘proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a man’.
Achillas refuses to submit to such defilement. He sees that what is really at stake is not the relative gravity of the insult he has received. What matters is to stop a cycle of violence, not to respond to hurt by inflicting hurt, to halt in his own heart the spread of the curse proclaimed by Lamech: ‘If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.’ Achillas, a disciple of Christ crucified, resolves to be true to his Master. He says: ‘This evil stays with me. I will not pass it on.’
He does not trumpet his pain. He drains its bitterness inwardly, admitting to himself his desire for vengeance and comeuppance, but only to draw from it a cause for repentance. This calls for mortification. ‘I have always liked the phrase “nursing a grudge”’, says the Reverend John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, ‘because many people are tender of their resentments, as of the thing nearest to their hearts.’ To let resentments go is costly.
God hears Achillas’s prayer for deliverance and lets him spit his wound out as blood, as if it were an ulcer; which, in fact, is what a grudge is, were we to seek a physiological simile for a spiritual malaise. Peace come at once. Achillas’s non-violence has made him apt to receive Christ’s gift. What is more, the grief which a moment ago was overwhelming is now forgotten. Once the disorder of wrath is expelled, the world once again appears ordered. By such stories the Fathers remind us that the passions to which we are subject are soul-sicknesses. In so far as we act on them, we project a sick vision of the world; we see little but sickness in it. We then perform disastrous diagnoses of persons, situations, and relationships.
It is said of Abba Agathon that he spent three years with a large pebble in his mouth until he learned to keep silence. That is how desirable it is to keep one’s tongue from speaking evil, even when the impact of evil has been endured.
A Monk of Valamo.