Arkiv, Høytlesning

Desert Fathers 5

This episode of desert Fathers in a Year was structured as a session of Q&A in which Jamie presented questions sent in by listeners. You can find the video here, the podcast wherever you listen to such things. Below is the script, kindly provided by a Canadian Benedictine. 

Jamie Baxter: So, Bishop Varden, welcome back to the series and to this kind of special episode here with Episode 5.

Bishop Varden: Thank you very much. I’m glad to be with you.

Jamie Baxter: Yeah, well, we’ve been so humbled, Bishop Varden, by so many beautiful questions that have come in from listeners from all around the world, and I’m so excited to surface those questions to you here.

Bishop Varden: It’s been good, and I think people are slightly mystified that an initiative like this should come out of Norway, but, you know, they follow it with interest, and I’ve had some good responses myself. And it’s just great to see that it might serve as a spur, as an inspiration to people.

Jamie Baxter: Yeah, well, I think that’s definitely the case, as we’ll see in some of these questions here.

But yeah, for me as well in Indiana, so central United States, I showed up to my parish for a meeting about something else, and everyone in the room had been listening to the podcast. And I was like, I couldn’t even believe it. So I was like, oh shoot, hopefully, it’s up to the standard. But oh my gosh, the warmth was just so beautiful to receive, and as a team, we’ve been so grateful for the response. And yeah, we’re just so excited about how the initiative here is unfolding.

So before we jump into our questions then, Bishop, would you open us with a short prayer?

Bishop Varden: Sure. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Come Holy Spirit, enlighten our hearts and our minds. Make us aware of your presence within us and among us and transform our lives through Christ our Lord. Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom, pray for us. Amen.

Jamie Baxter: All right, so I must confess that the first question is from me.

Bishop Varden: Good.

Jamie Baxter: With this opportunity live with you, I had one that’s been on my heart and mind, and I just wanted to see how you’d speak into this.

In Episode 3, you so beautifully talked about how Antony shows us the natural state. He almost—you know, you see the life of God in his presence. His likeness is heavy and observable.

And in my own reading of The Life of Antony, which was obviously the subject for the whole January series, you know, we do at times find a kind of disparagement towards the body and bodily needs. And I’m just kind of—this is something I’ve been struggling with because in my own journey, you know, we are the integration of many dimensions in personhood: body, mind, and soul.

And how do we kind of reconcile this kind of perfection that we see in Antony with sometimes the priority, if you will, given to the soul and to spiritual things, almost at the disparagement of the natural order? And do you think that this isn’t a—like, it’s an appreciation for human nature that’s grown over the past 1700 years? Or, you know, how do you reconcile some of those tensions?

Bishop Varden: Well, I think perhaps we should start by stressing that human nature is not reducible to just the physical nature.

And that obviously is Antony’s great labor and great adventure: to try and reconstitute a harmonious and well-balanced relationship between body, mind, and spirit. And when he can seem stern towards the body and bodily needs, well, I mean, he was. But I wouldn’t call it—and I don’t think he would have called it—a disparagement.

I think he would have spoken of it more in terms of establishing right proportion. Because, I mean, we all know how imperious the body’s demands can be and how obsessed we can be by bodily necessities and bodily desires. So what Antony wants to do in his pursuit of freedom is to put those desires in their place.

And thereby, I mean, he denies himself certain things. And he, you know, he fasts, he keeps vigils, he refrains from certain comforts—but not with a view to punishing himself, but in order, as it were, to bring the body into line. And it’s striking, you know, when he appears from the fort after those 20 years, the assembled crowds are very struck immediately by the fact that he’s neither too thin nor too thick.

So it’s not as though he hasn’t been—because he appears to them healthy. So it isn’t as though he’s, as it were, been abusing his body. But he’s been trying to break it in the way you would, you know, a wayward horse.

And that obviously is an ancient Greek image that some of the fathers use in order to reflect that wholeness and so to rediscover what a truly natural balance is. And that contrasts a little bit with our attitudes now, which are very body-centered. And, you know, that modern practice has healthy elements but can perhaps end up also being a bit imbalanced.

Jamie Baxter: Yeah, yeah, undoubtedly. Okay, so this question comes from J.C. Bishop Varden. She asks, What is the significance in the fact that Saint Athanasius, the great defender of the Trinity contra mundum, was also the one to write the hagiography of Saint Anthony the Great?

Bishop Varden: Now, that’s a good question and a very theological question, which we could talk about for an hour, probably, and it would be interesting.

Because, in fact, what is pointed to here is a crucial connection. Athanasius was, above all, the great defender of the doctrine of the Incarnation, which obviously is presupposed for our understanding of God’s Trinity. He was present at the Council of Nicaea, whose 1700th anniversary we commemorate this year, not yet a bishop, but as a bishop’s secretary.

And he became the great upholder of the doctrine of God’s Incarnation, of the fact that Christ is literally God-made man, not just an extraordinarily privileged and graced human being. And as we know, that’s quite a tough doctrine to get one’s mind round. The Arian doctrine, which had arisen as a contrast to the Orthodox doctrine, which upheld that Christ is a created being, extraordinarily privileged, but nonetheless a man that is, as it were, adopted into a divine state of being, is much easier to understand and to grasp.

So, Athanasius stood firm against Arianism, and that’s when this— it was Jerome who made that famous remark that he stood alone contra mundum, against the whole world. And it did seem like that for a bit, and that’s why Athanasius repeatedly was, you know, he was forced out of his diocese because almost everyone else was Arian. And that’s also one of the reasons he got to know Antony so well, because he spent two or three of those exiles out in the desert with the Fathers.

So, that by way of background. Now, I think a strong case can be made for seeing the life of Antony as a kind of QED of Athanasius’ incarnation theology. You know, quod erat demonstrandum, what you would put under a well-formulated mathematical formula when you’ve done your homework.

You know, I was set this task, this is the theory, and this is how it’s expressed in practice. Because what Athanasius shows us in Antony is what the divinization of the human being actually looks like. Because to say that God became man has momentous implications for our understanding of who God is, but it also has momentous implications for what it is to be a human being.

Because God wasn’t just a passing visitor in human nature, but we do believe, and that’s the Church’s faith, that the incarnation of Christ has left an abiding mark on human nature, and that mysteriously, by virtue of the incarnation and Christ’s resurrection and ascension into heaven, humanity is present within the mystery of the Trinity in some way which we haven’t got the conceptual vocabulary to articulate. So, it’s one thing to confess these things theoretically, to recite them in the Creed. It’s another thing to ask oneself, well, how does this work? What does it look like? And that’s where the story of Antony acquires all its theological density.

And Athanasius shows us many important things. He shows that the transformation of human nature, in most cases—I wouldn’t exclude this possibility, but for almost all of us—well, that process does not happen like this. It takes time.

It presupposes patience. It presupposes struggle. It presupposes a constant opening of a horizon. It presupposes a transformation of relationships. It presupposes a rereading of experience. And so, what Athanasius does is to show biographically what this tenet of the Church’s faith looks like.

And in showing how this looks like in Antony, who’s an ordinary human being like you and me, he basically tells us, his readers, you know, if this process could work and be fulfilled in Antony’s case, it could work in your case. With the implicit question, So what are you waiting for?

Jamie Baxter: Really quickly, Bishop Varden, can you give us a sense for how profound the threat of Arianism was? Because, I mean, it is such a gift in God’s providence that Athanasius has this icon in Antony, to defend the faith so heroically at such personal cost. But it was a great threat, I mean, in very high places throughout the Church.

But could you give us a sense for the gravity of just how influential Arianism was at the time?

Bishop Varden: It was overwhelming. I mean, overwhelming to the extent that orthodoxy had become almost invisible. And another one of Jerome’s quips, you know, he said, after a spurious church council that had more or less confirmed the Arian doctrine, he said, The whole world woke up and groaned to find itself Arian.

So Athanasius was a heroic defender. Obviously, he wasn’t on his own. He had people among the faithful in Alexandria and beyond who supported him. He was supported by the monastic establishment. He had bishop colleagues in the wider empire who supported him. But it was a pretty solitary struggle for a long time.

Jamie Baxter: So Tony asks, With the life of Antony, we get a sense of the internal struggles of the Desert Fathers. But as a biography, he says it lacks some of the interior struggle that many of us face in our contemporary desert of the real. Based on your own experience of solitude and what you have learned from the Fathers, what should someone in the desert be most aware of? Pitfalls, dead ends, red flags, or unexpected help? What does that interior map look like?

Bishop Varden: Hmm, that’s another good one.

Now, obviously, in terms of the life of Antony as a literary product, it is an extremely early example of the genre of biography. And in some ways, it’s astonishing how easily it reads. Its linear construction.

And the fact that we can, as 21st-century readers, dip into this text without too much of a prior introduction and navigate the text. So I would emphasize that. And at the same time, it’s entirely natural that Athanasius doesn’t quite share our modern sense of the importance of interior processes and would be less inclined to introspection, perhaps, than we are.

What to be aware of in the solitary experience? We should be talking about this quite a bit as the series unfolds. So I want to keep a few aces up my sleeve. But I think you could sum it up that what the Fathers warn against more than anything else is the risk of delusion.

And, you know, we can deal with that. And we can relate to that. When we step back from human society, we are faced with some of the chaos we carry within.

We also become very vulnerable to our own notions of things. And if we spend a lot of time without talking to anyone, and only hear our own voice, well, that voice can be quite a dictatorial voice. And we can end up being shut within ourselves.

That’s why it’s important and really, really crucial to remember that monastic seclusion presupposes that deep knowledge of sacred scripture that we’ve been talking about, and that you had an excellent exchange about in your roundtable. Because that is a safeguard against the solitary just listening to the tape, which is his own voice. Because the point is not to become seduced by one’s own thoughts, but to acquire the silence within that enables me to hear and, to some extent, be wounded by God’s word, the eternal word that will last unto eternity.

So, to beware of navel-gazing, to beware of an absorption in self, always to listen to the objective manifestation of God’s word through scripture, through the teaching of the church, through the monastic rule that soon enough became an important part of the monastic experience. That’s one thing.

Another thing is that, I mean, Antony is extraordinary because he is, you know, he’s the first of a kind. He’s a founder, a pioneer, someone who’s charting entirely new territory. But something that the tradition will insist on in the time that follows—we’ll talk about that as well—is the need to have a reliable guide, to be submitted in trust and in obedience to someone who knows the pitfalls and who knows the territory, and also who knows where the oasis are and the refreshing water that we need, so that I’m accountable to somebody who can guide me, encourage me, and correct me.

I think, I mean, we could say many other things, but I would insist on those things in particular:

• To avoid self-absorption, a shutting of myself into myself.
• To practice transparency with regards to a trusted other.

And obviously, we see that development shortly thereafter in the forms of monasticism which come, you know, within a hundred years.

Jamie Baxter: So I want to transition, Bishop, from questions about Antony to just the Desert Fathers a little bit more generally that have come in. And I’m going to ask two together because they’re similar. And I’ve also had these same questions, so I was really happy to see these come up. Ted asks, “How did the hermits and anchorites like Simon of the Pillar or Saint Antony fulfill their Sunday obligations?” And then Tony asks, “Why couldn’t the Desert Fathers and Mothers find what they were looking for in the church? How should the church today understand its relationship and responsibility for those who might feel calling today?”

Bishop Varden: Now, in terms of the Sunday obligation, we have examples in the literature of hermits withdrawing entirely for even a very long period of time, during which they will not have received the sacraments. We must remember that we’re dealing with a state of church life that was still seeking and finding its outward form. So some of the disciplines that we now take for granted weren’t necessarily yet defined in the fourth or fifth centuries.

We’ll come to that in the life of Saint Benedict as well, that he lived withdrawn from human company for a long time, and he receives a visitor who comes to see him on Easter Day, and Benedict doesn’t even know that it is Easter. He’s beyond, as it were, chronology. So that is not an experience that we should take as an ideal, but as a manifestation of some of these extreme experiences that, in response to a unique and particular call, led people to reenact in their own experience a real exodus journey.

But I stress these are exceptional examples. Mostly the hermits, and this is abundantly clear from the literature, and we find signs of it and explicit accounts of it in the sayings, people who lived as hermits in colonies such as Scetis or in other places in the desert would meet for what they called the synaxis, literally the being brought together on a Sunday. So they would, as it were, descend from their symbolic or real pillars on a Sunday.

Quite how Simeon the Stylite managed, I don’t know. I can’t remember his life by heart, but Simeon was an extremely public stylite, you know. There were lots of people gathering at the foot of his pillar, and there was a certain amount of wares being brought up and down on the pillar, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he also had some sort of sacramental provision being made, but we would have to look that up in the text to see how it worked.

In terms of the other question, why couldn’t people find what they were looking for in the church? Well, I think they would say that what they were looking for was part of the church, and what we find when we read their lives is not an account of people who’ve opted out or stepped aside, but who have extended the boundaries of the church. And it is very striking, you know, in Antony’s deathbed confession, when he gives his students and disciples and friends a Last Testament, he talks particularly about the importance of remaining in firm communion with the church.

We hear accounts of that as well in the sayings of the Desert Fathers. You know, someone who’s been living a solitary life for many years is visited by someone, and the first question they will ask—this is a sort of motif in several sayings—is, “How is the church of God? How are they faithful? What’s happening?” So they are very conscious of being at the boundary—existential and geographical—of what the church is in this world, but certainly not as being outside that boundary, and in a real way as carrying the whole church with them.

Jamie Baxter: Beautiful, beautiful response. I was hoping you were going to, you know, just highlight exactly that. They are in the church, and they are a witness and testimony that’s obviously brought transformation through centuries. David asks, “The Desert Fathers benefited from a radical separation from the world and spent years in their spiritual battles. They offer wonderful guidance. How can we even come close to realizing such a strong relationship with God, given the frenetic vocations in which we live?”

Bishop Varden: By taking one step at a time, and not necessarily a very long step. That too is part of the Desert pedagogy, and we find that explained in multiple examples.

I think the great illusion to which all of us are prone is to think that in order to begin to live a spiritual life, in order to begin to pray, in order to begin to apply asceticism, I need to change everything. I need first to reinvent myself, and then to begin.

Now that’s an illusion, because we’re not going to reinvent ourselves, and it may not be desirable to reinvent ourselves. What matters is to begin where I am, and to ask, “What can I do here in these circumstances?”

There too, the church’s hagiography, its lives of the saints, gives us so many examples of people pursuing perfection in the most improbable circumstances. It shows us—even, you know, I made this point that when Athanasius shows us Antony going through all these trials, it’s a way he has of reassuring us, his readers, saying, “Whatever you may be going through at the moment, however dark and scary that may seem, just look, Antony’s been there, he came out on the other side, you can come out on the other side.”

And likewise, by its extraordinarily varied range of sanctity proposed to us—of men and women, young and old, professional people, the very learned, the unalphabets, manual laborers, artists—the church shows us that no starting point is an impossible starting point. The important thing is to respond to Christ’s call, “Be converted now.”

You know, turning my chair around now and heeding that call, rather than thinking, “Oh yes, I’ll think about that tomorrow when I can book tickets to Barbados and begin my new life there.”

Jamie Baxter: So this reminds me, actually, of the very beginning of the life of Antony and kind of was a reframe for me on how he hears the gospel proclaimed to sell everything and give to the poor.

Bishop Varden: Right. I mean, that was a truth received and, you know, slowly, gradually revealed to him that struck him on that day. But there was a foundation in his own home, you know, that led to that reception at that time.

Jamie Baxter: Absolutely, and sometimes in order to prepare ourselves to hear a word, we need to work the terrain first.

Bishop Varden: Yes, it’s an agricultural metaphor that obviously we find in the gospel and in the sayings as well, and I think anyone who’s prayed the Liturgy of the Hours, say, for any length of time will have had that experience. I’ve certainly had it in my monastery, where we followed the principle laid out by Saint Benedict that we recite the entire Psalter every week—so lots of Psalms—and you really get to know these texts very well. You end up knowing a lot of the Psalter by heart, and sometimes it can seem just very, very familiar. But we will all have had that experience of suddenly, one day, at vigils, or at terse, or at compline in the evening, suddenly you find yourself singing a line that you’ve sung, I don’t know how many hundred or even thousand times, and suddenly you realize what it means. Suddenly you realize the message which is there—the call, the challenge, the grace—and you’re pierced by it. But that piercing presupposes, perhaps, that slow apprenticeship of getting the words inside you first, in order for then, at the opportune time, for the sense to be revealed.

Jamie Baxter: Beautiful. So we’re going to transition now in our questions to what I’m seeking guidance on, and Bishop Varden, in my imagination—my playful imagination here as these questions were coming in—I imagined them going to your monastery and saying, “Speak, Father, into my situation,” much like the saying. So, I do want to thank all these wonderful, beautiful people who submitted such humbling questions for Bishop to speak into.Bekos, pardon me if I’m mispronouncing that, asks: “My soul has no destination set, and I’m in constant imbalance and doubt. Please advise as if I am almost lost.”

Bishop Varden: Well, you’re not lost, because you have been found. And that’s the key thing to hold on to. We can so easily think that when it comes to the life of faith, the life of virtue, the life of transformation, we’re the agents, and God is a mysterious destination that we hope we might one day reach after having completed an impossible obstacle race. Well, it’s not like that. You know, God always finds us first and assures us that we’re wanted, that we’re sought, assures us that He sees our dignity—even when we may have made all sorts of unfortunate choices to conceal that dignity, or we may have forgotten about it ourselves. And He calls us to rise to our full stature and to start coming home. The great paradigm of the life of conversion is the paradigm of the prodigal son.

In the pedagogy of the Cistercian order to which I belong, St. Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th century formulated an entire model really of monastic formation on that parable. And you remember how it goes: the young man, in search of a thrill, in search of self-affirmation, in search of discoveries, in search of riches, excitement, wealth, sensual pleasure, goes off and finds a lot of what he seeks. But he also finds that those immediate thrills that he seeks don’t satisfy in the long run and don’t actually sustain a life. And then he finds himself impoverished, estranged, and in circumstances that are hostile, alien, and frightening. He has to go through all that in order to reach the point that the gospel pithily sums up in the phrase: “And then one day, he came to himself”—literally, as if he’d been living outside himself for all this time and not in touch with his true yearning, with his inner compass, not actually realizing himself, but a projection of self. He suddenly realizes the extent of his alienation and says, “Enough of this! I’ve had enough of being miserable, and I’ve had enough of running. I want to stop running.”

So he came to himself, realized where he was, but that’s only stage one. Because the coming to himself immediately turns him round, because it has enlivened in him the firm proposition, “I shall return to my father’s house. I shall come back to where I was loved, in the hope and confident expectation that I will still be loved there. I will return to my roots, which I’ve been trying to cut, but perhaps a vital connection can still be restored. I shall make whole what I’ve fragmented.” And as he walks, you know, his resolve is steeled. And when he comes near the father’s house, he finds not only that he’s allowed in, but that he has been expected and that the father has been out looking for him.

So, that would be my primary counsel: Remember, you’re not lost because you have been found, and someone’s looking for you.

Jamie Baxter: Chandler asks, How do we discern and live out the balance between the peace of a tranquil contemplative existence and the demands of active labor or ministry, especially considering the scriptural warnings against sloth as a mortal sin? These episodes have been greatly inspirational to my current chaotic life. Thank you.

Bishop Varden: Now, I would begin there by subverting the question a little bit, if I may, and stress that the contemplative life is not necessarily tranquil. That’s also a point I’ll be making more than once during this part of this course or series, that when the fathers speak of the contemplative ideal of the life of peace, of quiet, they always presuppose the struggle. And that struggle is often exemplified in the stories that are told about them. But what they learn during the course of their conversion is not—well, it’s not to be overwhelmed by the struggle.

And perhaps we need to abandon the fanciful idea, which is another illusion that can haunt us, that, “Oh, I just need to get out of this battle and finish this conflict and get this thing sorted out, and then I can begin.” They own the struggle, which they themselves constitute—their own internal contradictions, temptations, et cetera. And increasingly, as they grow in the spiritual life, they become equipped to contain and hold in prayer, and through charity, the struggles of others.

Someone who’s experiencing difficulty comes to somebody else asking for a word, but implicit in that request is also a kind of cry for help, saying, “Can you carry me in this?” And the answer is always a “Yes,” because that is what it is to be a Christian: to bear one another’s burdens.

So, the contemplative life is not a life where you’ve got everything just sorted out and you can lean back in a state of continuous bliss, but it’s learning to integrate struggle into a peaceful aspiration. And once you’ve realized that, well, it doesn’t seem so incompatible, perhaps, with just an ordinary existence.

Obviously, there are measures we can take in order to try and make life a little bit less frenetic. I mean, that’s very much the thought behind many of the exercises in Exodus 90, isn’t it? Trying to unplug some of the noxious or disturbing or unhelpful stimuli that don’t actually fire me in a way that’s life-giving. So we need to think constructively, critically, creatively, hopefully about that and see what I can actually do in order to arrange my life more sensibly.

But I would say this, and again, the Church reminds us of it by countless examples, that no objective state of life is incompatible with the contemplative pursuit and even the fulfillment of the contemplative ideal.

Jamie Baxter: Anthony asks, I’m discerning the priesthood, but I am very torn between diocesan and a religious order. I used to be a diocesan seminarian and I’m now heavily looking into an order. How do I know which direction to go into?

Bishop Varden: That sort of discernment is always difficult and perilous. Sometimes it’s hard to offer generic advice because a vocation is always a personal reality. I would advise, first of all, great faith in providence. I would advise the practice and prayer of abandonment—of really putting oneself resolutely into God’s hands, asking for direction, asking for pointers in the right direction.

Then, and this is a really important stage subsequent to making that prayer, make a habit of living with eyes and ears open to actually see what happens around me, to listen to the words that people speak to me, to be alert to the encounters I make. More often than not, the will of God manifests itself in what actually happens, so pay attention to that.

Pay attention to your own deepest desire and also look squarely and realistically at your own gifts and limitations. If I am somebody who needs to sleep 10 hours a night and can’t really function unless I have a steak three times a week, then the likelihood that I’m called to be a Carthusian is relatively slight. That’s just to take one example.

But look at what your gifts are, what your limitations are, what is realistic, and work on the basis of that. Because grace builds on nature, and God knows who you are, and also knows what will serve your flourishing and will enable you to render the most effective service. So, pray, listen, watch, and follow.

Jamie Baxter: Fabian asks, How to live the ascetic life in a big city?

Bishop Varden: Well, in some ways, life in a big city is an asceticism. You’re caught up in a universe that doesn’t run by criteria you’ve set. So life in a big city can be an excellent setting for training in the ascetic life by practicing patience, for example, which is a great and holy virtue.

So, that is one starting point. Another starting point will be to practice the asceticism of attention. One feature of life in the city is that people just run past one another. No one ever meets your gaze, whether it’s in the street or in the subway. But to be on the lookout for human beings in the crowd and acknowledging them by showing reverence—that is, by being courteous, by being kind, by letting someone else go first, by extending a hand to someone who’s slipping on the ice, being a bearer of fraternity in the midst of anonymity.

And then, to try within a universe which is by its nature full of noise, to carry an inward silence. Because if you start accustoming yourself to that, and you become a bearer of silence—even if no one can hear it—it will have an effect. The person sitting next to you on the bus will somehow feel that silence and receive it as a blessing.

And you will become a bearer of peace in the midst of disquiet, and that is beatitude. So, there are many other things you can do, but those would be three practices to start with.

Jamie Baxter: Augustine asks, I run a men’s accountability group under the patronage of St. Anthony, where courageous young men come together each week to pray before our Lord and grow in brotherhood. Having seen the fruitfulness of asceticism in combating temptation in my own life, I often encourage these young men to fast and pray, but worldliness is a tempting proposition against it for some of these men. How might I encourage these men to truly give the ascetic life a chance, especially when they feel it is too difficult? Thank you, and God bless you for all you do with the series.

Bishop Varden: Well, I think, carry on as you’re going, and propose to them goals that are attainable goals. It’s, I mean, it’s again that same point of proceeding step by step and in steps that aren’t too large. So find ways in which they can get a taste of new freedom, perhaps even of an uncommon freedom, and so acquire that appetite and desire to carry on on their own, because we must always remember that the engine of the spiritual life and of the ascetic life is desire.

The ascetic life isn’t about cutting off desire, zombifying ourselves, it’s about orienting desire. It’s about directing the vital force that possesses us so that instead of being distracted, it carries us in one direction towards a desirable goal. So set the desirable, indicate the desirable goal, set realistic aims, and try to manifest, by your own example, the benefits of a coherent practice.

Jamie Baxter: And Augustine, thank you so much for that. Yeah, beautiful work you do with them. That mentorship in the church is so important. So thank you, and those men are blessed to have you. Zilvanus asks, Hello, I have a problem praying in silence. My thoughts fly away. Any advice on that?

Bishop Varden: Yes. It’s just so succinct, I love this. It’s very good.

Well, my first advice would be to start by simply practicing sitting still. So fix yourself the practice of sitting still in a chair for at least seven minutes every day without being attached to anything that moves or makes a sound or makes any sort of demand. And practice being physically quiet without moving.

Then if your thoughts plague you, well, first of all, ask yourself where those thoughts come from. Is there a pattern to those thoughts? Is there a motif to those thoughts? And if you find that there is, I’m simply making this up now because I don’t know anything about you, but say I’m praying and I’m consciously disturbed by the thought of a friend who’s really no longer a friend, someone with whom I’ve had a conflict, and I’m haunted by hurt perhaps and anger and humiliation. Well, that suggests that there is a work of healing and reconciliation that has got to be affected.

And it’s no good just saying to those thoughts, oh, be quiet, go away, because they point to an unfinished task. And part of my growth in prayer will be engagement with that task. There will be other thoughts that are simply distractions.

In their case, the most useful thing you can do is simply not to attend to them. The fathers sometimes used to liken those thoughts to flies that swarm around you. And you know how irritating that can be and how obsessive that can be if you start actually listening to the buzzing.

And before long, the only thing you can hear is the buzzing of the fly. And the fathers then recommend the mental discipline of simply pretending that the fly wasn’t there and not engaging with it. And then you will find that the thought loses its energy after a time and goes away.

So first of all, don’t pay any attention to thoughts that are just distractions, but attend to the message of thoughts that speak about a task, something you should be doing, or perhaps should stop doing, something that is unfinished business in your life. Make a little note of that. And that can be useful when you pray to have a little notebook.

And if you have an inspiration like that, you can make a note to yourself, look at this, and you will know that that matter is there. It’s in the notebook. It won’t go away.

So I don’t need to carry on thinking about it now. I can think about that later. Those are just two very practical pieces of advice.

A third one, which the fathers would recommend, is that of concentrating your mind by repeating some sort of mantra, by repeating a word from scripture, by repeating the Jesus prayer, by repeating just the name of Jesus in order to focus your mind, which is active and will remain active, and give it something to hold onto that will, as it were, magnetize the mind in a way that nurtures the concentration of the heart.

Jamie Baxter: Christopher asks, Will you be discussing the Jesus prayer? And then we’d love for you, Bishop, to share about our February series and where you’ll be recording it so that listeners have a sense for what to expect in the coming month.

Bishop Varden: I mean, one could have a whole year’s series about the Jesus prayer. So I shan’t be dealing with it exhaustively. But we will be talking about it and its significance because it is fundamental to the practice of the Desert Fathers.

And as you said, Jamie, we’re about to start February, and I will begin a new thematic section. The idea of this series is that for each month, each calendar month, we will have, as it were, a topical heading that will loosely follow the subject headings in the systematic collection of the sayings of the Desert Fathers. So for February, I’m simply going to start with what is the first chapter in that collection, which carries the heading perfection.

What is perfection? And I should say something about what perfection is and what it isn’t. That it isn’t perhaps such a frightening word as it may at first appear. And we’ll say something about why it’s important to have a goal clearly fixed in one’s mind before one starts traveling.

Jamie Baxter: Beautiful. Well, with that, Bishop Varden, would you close us in a prayer?

Bishop Varden: Absolutely, but first of all, I also want to extend my thanks to everyone who sent in these questions for your openness and for your trust. And just a warm encouragement to everyone who’s following the series.

It’s great to have you on board and let’s hope that together we can actually make some headway this year.

Jamie Baxter: Yeah, beautiful. I echo all those sentiments and I’m so grateful for all of these questions, the comments that we’ve been receiving across all of the channels. So yeah, thank you so much for listening and it’s just been a delight and we’re so excited by what the year holds.

And Bishop Varden, from me and the listeners to you, I’ve received so many notes from people just, wow, his mastery of English is really something. And for me, I’ve had such a gift, really with our whole team, really entering into these teachings, trying to metabolize them, reflecting on them before our round tables and just the beauty you raised in your presentation on Anthony has been a source of much spiritual fodder for me.

And so I just express my gratitude as an extension of all of our listeners for your time in this series. You know, what we’re called to in the church is to be of use to one another. So we just have to try and do what we can.

Bishop Varden: Lord, we thank you for your abiding presence, which renews and transforms and sheds light in our darkness. Open our hearts, our minds, our bodies, our entire lives to the transforming power of your presence and make us new men and women apt to reflect your glory through our Lord Jesus Christ, your son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

Jamie Baxter: Amen. Okay. And with that, just as Anthony ended his life with the words to the monks, we’ll wrap up this first month on Anthony by simply exhorting us all to, you know, for us to really may Christ be the air that we breathe and may we extend his presence in our persons to those that we encounter. God bless you.

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