Archive, Readings
Desert Fathers 19
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Some brothers set out from Scetis to see Abba Antony. When they got into the boat to travel to where he was they met another old man. He, too, intended to travel to the same place; but the brothers did not know him. Sitting down in the boat, they began to speak about the sayings of the Fathers, and about Scripture, and about their manual labour. The old man, meanwhile, kept quite the entire time. Arrived at port, they found that the old man, too, was going to see Antony. When they came to him, he said to them: ‘In this old man you have found excellent company!’ Then he said to the old man: ‘Abba, you have found and brought with you some fine brothers!’ The old man said to him: ‘Yes, they are good; but their yard has no gate. Anyone who wishes can come in and let loose the donkey.’ He said this because they said aloud everything that came into their mouth.
The next book in the collection is about self-mastery. This is the full title in the Greek text: ‘About self-mastery, to be kept not only with regard to food, but also with regard to the other movements of the soul.’ We, now, are obsessed with food. Even journals of spirituality have cookery columns. Obesity is a challenge to public health throughout the Western world; at the same time dieting is a secular religion. The coexistence of these two trends is representative of much societal tension. We are quirky about what we eat and drink on account of real or imagined intolerance or simply on the basis of taste. With so much else not working around us, we want to get our food orders exactly right. It is a way, I suppose, of making us feel we are somehow in control. So rampant is this tendency of specific requirement that if you go into a coffee shop and ask for a straight coffee with caffeine and cow’s milk the barista gives you a blank look. ‘What? Not even a shot of pumpkin spice?’ Ask an average Catholic what he or she is doing for Lent, and the chances are you will hear about dietary regulation. This is excellent, of course, but if we dig a little, we often find a sub-text of self-interest: the wish to fit again into clothes bought last year or awareness that the habit of taking just a single extra glass of wine has gone too far.
Since the role food plays in our lives is already so much in focus, it is striking to find that the first entry in this section speaks, not of fasting, but of restraint in speech. We meet Antony once more, dear Antony, who spent the final period of his life on a mountain in the inner desert, solitary yet always ready to receive guests who came to him for solace or advice. His fame had reached far. At one point the emperor, Constantine, called for Antony to come and see him. Antony asked his friend, Abba Paul, ‘Should I go?’ ‘If you go’, said Paul, you will be called Antony. If you refrain from going, you will be called Abba Antony.’ Antony wrote a nice letter to the emperor, but stayed put. The word ‘abba’ means ‘Father’. It was by fidelity to his desert outpost, by perseverance in his specific call, that Antony acquired his moral authority. Thereby his life became fruitful. More and more people came to regard him as their father, as a man who was for others a source of life. Pilgrims started coming from far away, like the four men described in the saying above.
Note Antony’s cordial welcome. Long years in seclusion had not made him crusty. He remains an attentive, generous host. Note, too, the visiting elder’s thoughtfulness. For several days he has had occasion to observe his fellow travellers. He recognises them as sincere: ‘They are good!’ The reference to the loose donkey permits him nonetheless to communicate salutary fraternal correction. In ancient Egypt a donkey was for the average farmer tractor, car, and bus all in one: indispensable for the management of necessary tasks. The old man shows that we lose something truly vital by unbridled talk, be it about edifying topics. In as much as we nurture the urge to say all that occurs to us, inner strength is tapped. The monk’s turn of phrase is telling. He blames his young friends for speaking everything that comes ‘into their mouth’. There is a stage at which speech is still potential. A thought has been articulated; the words lie ready on our tongue; but as yet they exist only in our mind. At that moment we exercise sovereign freedom to choose whether to speak or whether to keep silent. The old man lets us see that this choice should be carefully pondered, for much is at stake: the whereabouts of the donkey, our inner dynamo.
It is good to reflect on this matter today, when everything is set to let us say and share absolutely everything that occurs to us however vaguely. Hoards of donkeys are roaming around to no useful purpose, eating freely from strangers’ flower beds, while we are left feeling exhausted and deflated. Discourse thereby becomes superficial. So does society itself. Once we realise what can be wrought by a good, deliberate word, we discover how easily mere chatter turns into a deafening, dull, unproductive din. We wake up, then, to the responsibility we carry through our freedom either to speak or to be silent. That freedom is always there, even when our tongue is really itching. As Jesus Ben Sirach wrote more than two millennia ago: ‘Have you heard a word? Let it die with you. Be brave! It will not make you burst!’
