Fr Billy Swan
I am blessed to have a Spiritual Director who happens to be a Trappist monk. Each time I leave his monastery after a visit, it feels like I have slaked my thirst for God by drinking from a living stream of wisdom distilled from centuries of contemplation and prayer. For sure, this wise monk draws from his own experience as a religious and a seasoned Spiritual Director but the wisdom he imparts is greater than his own. Like pristine water that flows from a melting glacier, the wisdom he shares has come from a source further back and higher up. As a Trappist monk, the spiritual guidance he offers is drawn from a stream that extends back to great figures from the monastic tradition like St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Benedict. Yet there is an even earlier source of this sacred wisdom that people like Bernard and Benedict themselves inherited that deserves to be better known by the whole Church. I speak of the wisdom of the Desert Fathers.
The Desert Fathers were early Christian hermits who began to make their way into the Egyptian desert from about the late third century onwards, beginning with St Anthony (c. 251-356) who is regarded as the founder of monasticism and whose feast day we celebrate on January 17th. By the time of Anthony’s death, thousands of monks and sisters had followed him into the desert, drawn by a desire to live the life of Christ in a more radical way after the legalization of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire in 313 AD. Yet, their entry into the desert was not a form of escapism. Deeply conscious of the Biblical tradition of the desert being a place of conversion, transformation and preparation for mission, what these holy people were seeking was their true selves in Christ that coincided with detachment from their own egos and pride.
As time progressed, the traditions of prayer and the ascetic life that began with the Desert Fathers, influenced the monastic tradition of Mount Athos in the East and the Rule of St Benedict in the West and so shaped Eastern and Western spirituality for centuries to come. Significantly, their wisdom does not come to us as direct teaching but as a collection of brief conversations known as the Apophthegmata Patrum or ‘Sayings of the Desert Fathers’. These conversations happened between the seeker and a Desert Father or ‘Abba’ who accompanied the person, imparting spiritual and practical guidance.
So, what can these ancient monks teach us as we live in a world radically different to theirs? How can they teach us how to pray? By teaching us the value of silence and solitude as the conditions for a transforming encounter with God and how to navigate the challenging terrain of the human heart.
Silence and Solitude
We live in a noisy and hectic world. Most of us are uncomfortable with silence. Why? Because only silence allows us to hear what is really going on within our restless hearts. Only when we are still can we listen to what the Spirit within is saying to us: “Be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). Only in silence can we hear what we need to hear and can’t hear if we keep running away, losing ourselves in activism, compulsions and addictions. What the Desert Fathers anticipated is our inability to face ourselves – our wounds, our incompleteness, imperfection, limitations, losses and need for love. Not facing ourselves and never taking the time to pray our vulnerable realities before God results in a life of sadness and unfulfillment as we reach instead for compensations and distractions that can never satisfy.
The same is true for solitude. We fear loneliness. But loneliness is not the same as solitude. Loneliness is a state of disconnection, from ourselves, from God and others. Solitude purifies our ability to connect and relate better. In the modern secular sensibility that leaves little room for God, to be alone is to be completely alone which is why so many of us fear it. Yet, for the Desert Fathers, to quote St Ambrose, “we are never less alone than when alone”.[1] In other words, for the believer, we are never completely alone for God is more intimately present to us as lover and friend than we are to ourselves. Solitude allows us to face ourselves with courage, entering a space where transformation is possible. Solitude is not “a private therapeutic place but rather a place of conversion - the place where the old self dies and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the new person occurs”.[2]
In our noisy and distracted world, each of us needs to cultivate times of silence and solitude as part of our habit of prayer. We don’t always need music or the radio on in the car. We don’t always need to be talking just for the sake of it. Take the time to put aside your smart phone, shut down your lap-top and turn off that noise. Listen with your heart when you stay in the silence of a holy hour before the Blessed Sacrament. Listen to how you are feeling and ponder the reasons why. Ask the Lord for the grace to understand yourself better. Allow Him to accept you, love you, cherish you, refresh you. Do not be afraid to face up to your limitations, lacks and wants. Awareness of these lacks and wants makes us poorer in spirit, which brings us closer to the kingdom of heaven (Cf. Matt. 5:3). Don’t be afraid of being alone for the one who has Christ is never alone.
Prayer with the Heart
The Desert Fathers take us on a deep-sea dive into the human heart and prepare it to be the organ of constant prayer. By entering the desert, they not only entered the wilderness of a geographical desert but mapped the wilderness of the human heart, long before the science of psychology was recognized. With their sayings and writings, they go before us to help us understand the mystery of who we are. We might think that the Desert Fathers fled from the real world to live in a world of spiritual abstractions. By entering the desert, they were indeed fleeing but not from reality – rather from the distractions that prevented them from facing the full reality of who they were as graced but flawed human beings. Abba Arsenius, a third century Desert Father, was once advised when he prayed “Lord, lead me in the way of salvation”. In response, he heard a voice that said “Arsenius, flee, be silent, pray always, for these are the sources of sinlessness”.[3]
For the Desert Fathers, the goal of the spiritual life was purity of heart as a direct response to Jesus’ teaching in the beatitudes: “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8). In order to attain this purity, purgation was necessary for as Jesus identified, our hearts contain impurities that need to be removed: “It is out of the heart that evil thoughts come - murder, adultery, sexual immorality, stealing, false testimony, and slander” (Matt. 15:19: cf. Mark 7:21ff). In the Biblical tradition, and for the Desert Fathers, the heart meant the center of the person, the locus of the will, emotions and intellect. And so, when Jesus asks us to love God “with all our heart” (Matt. 22:37), he is calling us to love with our total and united selves. For John Cassian (c. 360-435) and other Desert Fathers, purity of heart was the state of a single-minded search for God. According to Cassian’s Conferences, fasting, prayers and ascetic practices serve the purpose of helping us achieve this purity of heart and the unity of the self that is needed to love totally.[4]
As fellow sinners, the Desert Fathers remind us that this unity of the self is compromised by sin that needs forgiveness and healing. They made the early diagnosis that our prayer arises from a divided heart and that genuine prayer happens when we are aware of this. For Evagrius of Pontus (345-400), being attentive to the dynamics of the heart is important: “Nothing is more essential to prayer than attentiveness”.[5] Courage is also needed to face ourselves for when we do, we meet our demons. Yet the Desert Fathers give us hope for in this battle with our demons whether they be addictions or disordered passions, we fight with the warrior who has won the battle before us. For in the deepest part of our darkness we find Jesus the Lord of light waiting to meet us to bring hope for “where sin abounds, there grace abounds all the more” (Rom. 5:20).
This focus on purity of heart is timely. Last year, Pope Francis published the encyclical Dilexit Nos or “He Loved Us” in which he writes:
“The [human] heart is the locus of sincerity, where deceit and disguise have no place…Despite our every attempt to appear as something we are not, our heart is the ultimate judge, not of what we show or hide from others, but of who we truly are. It is the basis for any sound life project; nothing worthwhile can be undertaken apart from the heart. False appearances and untruths ultimately leave us empty-handed”.[6]
Here is the wisdom anticipated by the Desert Fathers. The purgation of the heart that they pursued, serves the ultimate purpose of more intimate union with God. The more detached we become from our false self, the stronger is our communion with God. This is why purity of heart is so important and is the foundation of holiness. When I go to confession at the end of my spiritual direction with the Trappist monk, he acknowledges the details of my sins but always probes the motives within the heart that gave rise to them. Like a doctor who treats a patient with a hemorrhage, he or she wipes away the blood but wants to find out the wound the blood is coming from. This was the wisdom of the Desert Fathers that we continue to benefit from today. They were the first to navigate the great struggle within the human heart that all of us share and how wholesome thoughts, gracious words and loving acts flow from a heart that is pure and filled with selfless love.
To conclude. In his Confessions, St Augustine recalls the time he and his friend Alypius were visited by a man named Ponticianus who tells them how two of his friends were inspired to dedicate their lives to Christ after reading the story of St. Anthony of the Desert. Augustine is overcome with shame at his inability to follow their example and yet inspired to do so eventually - to give his will and his life over to Christ as Anthony had done many years beforehand.[7] If the life of St Anthony changed the life of St Augustine, can Anthony’s life and the witness of the Desert Fathers not change ours? These earliest monks have much to teach us and much to advise to offer in our noisy and overly stimulated world today. Not least they teach us how to pray by embracing times of solitude and silence, attuning the passions of the human heart to the passionate love of God so that God’s love might transform us to become “all flame”.[8]
[1] St Ambrose, Epist. 33.
[2] H. Nouwen, The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Harper One, NY, 1981, p. 27.
[3] B. Ward, ed., The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, Cistercian Publications, Kentucky, 1975, p. 9.
[4] Idem., p.112ff.
[5] Evagrius of Pontus, On Prayer, 149, in Philokalia, Vol. 1, p.71
[6] Pope Francis, Dilexit nos, 5-6.
[7] See St Augustine, Confessions, 8, 6, 14; 8, 12, 29.
[8] Abba Joseph’s advice to Abba Lot on how to progress in the spiritual life: “If you will, you can become all flame”. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, p. 103.